Deliberative workshops to address the Scope 3 challenge

When controversies arrive suddenly and unexpectedly, how can researchers respond productively to the issues they provoke? In this blog, Matilda Becker, Molly James and Alexis McGivern reflect on work by Oxford Net Zero’s (ONZ) Engagement Team, supported by the Agile Initiative Enabling Fund, which responded to a controversy over the summer of 2024. After outlining the source of controversy, Becker, James and McGivern highlight four things they learned about delivering rapid-response programmes with diverse stakeholders.

Validating corporate climate targets: the Science Based Targets Initiative

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is the largest validator of corporate climate targets in the world. Validation happens once companies or financial institutions have set an emissions reduction target in line with SBTi’s criteria, which include, for example, specifying the percent of emission reduction that a company will commit to (e.g., 50% by 2030).  Entities undergo this scrutinous process because SBTi offers credibility and rigour to companies’ climate commitments. SBTi’s target-setting criteria are seen as too onerous and restrictive by some members of the business community and as being too permissive and/or validating ‘low-integrity’ climate strategies by some civil society actors.

Controversy unfolds

Scrutiny over SBTi’s criteria sharply increased in April 2024 when SBTi released a Board statement indicating that their criteria may be changed to increase flexibility on how companies could use instruments such as offsets to count against hard-to-reduce emissions. More specifically, the Board Statement detailed expanding companies’ ability to use environmental attribute certificates (EACs), a type of carbon accounting instrument that includes carbon offsets and renewable energy certificates, to reduce emissions from their value chain. These emissions, also known as ‘Scope 3’, represent the hard-to-reduce emissions outside of a company’s direct control, such as goods and activities within their supply chain. This announcement sparked a debate about the role of EACs in companies’ efforts to reach net zero and drew attention to SBTi’s decision-making process.

ONZ’s Engagement Team, together with the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, convened nearly 30 academics to understand and discuss issues with the proposed new change, aiming to produce a summary briefing for SBTi’s technical team to reference during their Corporate Net Zero Standard consultation. Discussions of these workshops are summarised here. In this blog, we focus on some of the methodological questions and key learnings from the workshops.

1. Rethink what constitutes ‘success’

The workshops intended to generate usable outcomes for corporate climate governance, and to further the debate around EACs. It became clear that this was not straightforward.  Despite using pre-interviews and collaborative drafting of agendas to ensure that the topics reflected what participants wanted to discuss, there were many diverse views in the room, and opening topics of concern introduced greater complexities and disagreements into our discussion. Having varied views in tension with one another meant that little was agreed, and few robust conclusions were reached. This highlighted the value of reframing what ‘success’ constituted in this context: moving away from generating concrete conclusions towards recognising the value of identifying the areas of concern and enhancing mutual understanding across disciplinary perspectives and worldviews.

2. Question baseline assumptions

Throughout the workshops, participants frequently returned to the question of unpicking ‘why’ the system of Scope 3 emissions measurement was the default system we were trying to improve. This was only a minor point on our original agenda, and due to time constraints, we decided to focus on practical recommendations for the existing system to provide recommendations to SBTi. However, we never fully addressed or debated this question. Doing so may have led to radically reviewing the ways in which we should measure and manage GHG emissions, rather than the original focus of the workshop.

3. If the questions are complex, unpacking the answers takes time

We were surprised that the process of hosting workshops felt like the unboxing of a bigger conversation. Certain constructively critical voices were boldest after the workshops, when a workshop summary was shared with participants. As much negotiation was involved in the document drafting process as in the workshops themselves. The timeline to complete this work was several weeks longer than anticipated. We had assumed that areas of debate might be resolved in the workshops, but discovered instead that they came to life most boldly during the document-drafting period. This reminded us that co-production needs time, is difficult to shoehorn into others’ governance timelines and is multi-modal. It is therefore necessary to build time for ongoing debate into project structures for authentic outputs to be delivered.

4. Consider the role facilitators play in opening doors, not just conversations

The workshops shed light on incompatibilities between form and structure – what’s the implication of using workshops to try and fix problems partly generated by hegemonic techno-bureaucratic systems that value a certain type of ‘science’ over other ways of understanding or realising net-zero futures? What are the ethical considerations of convening people to bring about change, when participants and the institution in question are potentially on quite different wavelengths? There is an inherent tension involved in bringing non-hegemonic views into structures that SBTi and other standard setters might regard as appropriate in terms of timing, format or political-economic framing. If concerns already fitted such formats and framings they would likely be addressed already. This speaks to bringing ‘critique’ into global governance – if a critique is raised, what’s the next step in terms of influencing change in the systems themselves? Are global institutions ready and equipped to respond to these kinds of conversations?  Is it enough to have space to take stock, without simultaneously creating the spaces within the institutions for the knowledge to land?

Using our learning going forward

We know that the workshops sparked new connections between participants, and we know they were an important mechanism for building trust and expanding participants’ understanding of other viewpoints. For ONZ’s Engagement Team, the workshops are the beginning of an exciting conversation, which we intend to continue over the next year as new research projects begin, especially our new research programme aiming to develop equity criteria for corporate net-zero standards based on global youth perspectives.