Models like heroes? Making Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) ready for deep decarbonization and a socio-economic transformation

Abstract

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are among the most influential tools for global climate action. While IAM research contributed enormously to the current awareness of the climate crisis, their approach to transformation pathways has faced significant criticism. This critique illuminates that diverse aspects of social, political, and economic processes shape IAM research. This paper provides the first systematic literature review (based on the PRISMA approach) of the diverse criticisms that specifically target the political implications of IAM modeling practices. After reviewing a sample of 71 scientific publications extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, we describe the various social science concepts utilized in the literature and argue that they reveal stabilizing functions performed by IAM modeling. These functions legitimize and rationalize the crisis-ridden societal conditions, if they are not actively addressed in the research process. To elucidate the modus operandi of these stabilizing functions, we introduce the concept of ideology as a mediator between existing societal conditions and the research practice, offering a novel framework to conceptualize the critique of IAM modeling practices. To illustrate how IAMs often fall short of their goal of presenting pathways out of the climate crisis, instead contributing to the stabilization of crisis-ridden societal conditions, and how to prevent this, we introduce an analogy to superheroes. Based on these findings, we suggest a participatory approach that includes the visions of social movements and systematic research on deep socio-economic transformations facilitated by the Categorical Utopia framework.