Much of the debate about the implications of recent controversies in climate change science has focused on the contested credibility of institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Western societies. The North American- and Euro-centrism of the debate may simply reflect the location of the controversies themselves and the geography of the media attention which they garnered. However, it may also reflect the frequent obfuscation of the complexity in how scientific knowledges and their attendant controversies travel. A growing body of work has shown that the perceived credibility and legitimacy of bodies like the IPCC is not universal, and concepts such as civic epistemology have been employed to show how the authorization of knowledge claims is shaped by local norms and practices of public knowledge-making at various spatial scales. The IPCC has employed a number of strategies to gain international credibility, for instance through targeted efforts to increase the participation of experts from developing countries – a strategy which is often presented as being more about gaining global assent than about diversifying the epistemological basis of its assessments. Drawing on my research on the relationship between the IPCC and Indian scientific and political communities, I explore how the acceptance of particular knowledge claims is contingent on local circumstances and political culture. A history of epistemic contestation between Indian and Western experts provides an important context for understanding the political effects of the so-called ‘Himalayagate’ controversy, which was a central part of the broader ‘Climategate’ episode of late 2009 and early 2010. A distinctive Indian civic epistemology which embraces the intermixing of the epistemic and the normative shaped the response to the episode, and illustrates that ‘global credibility’ is not just a simple function of sound science and international representation.