EPISTEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: PRODUCING EVIDENCE IN THE 'SPACE BETWEEN FIELDS'

This thesis examines how evidence about the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence is produced in the space between the fields of science, journalism and politics. Between 2018 and 2025, a body of reports emerged to quantify both the energy use of AI and its potential positive effects on the environment, circulating widely in the press and in policy debate. These reports are assembled by a range of actors, including consultancies, intergovernmental organisations, banks and NGOs. Drawing on content analysis of nineteen reports, thirty-three interviews with their authors and participants in the debate, and 439 press articles analysed through semantic-network mapping and manual coding, the thesis argues that the debate gives rise to epistemic entrepreneurs: actors who strategically produce knowledge claims to acquire authority and convert it for political or economic gain. Their work is conditioned by an uncertain context that creates a demand for experts to act as reporters, that is, to relay numbers that describe an already-existing reality rather than to account for the methodological work by which numbers are made. Epistemic entrepreneurs produce evidence in a space where the conventions of objectivity are dissociated from the accountability mechanisms that would ordinarily test them. They therefore run the risk of naïve empiricism, giving a dominant voice to authoritative actors regardless of the fragility of their claims. The thesis argues that this risk is a structural feature of a public sphere in which epistemic claims are produced outside the established fields that once held them accountable.