Hannah Hughes

This article has two aims. The first is to provide an account of the struggle over the term biocultural diversity during the intergovernmental approval of the first IPBES thematic assessment report. Second, in detailing this struggle, we aim to contribute to scholarship on global environmental negotiating processes and the place and power of knowledge within these by introducing the notion of a weighted concept. Our analysis starts with the observation that the emergence of new scientific terms through global assessments has the potential to activate political struggle, which becomes part of the social construction of the concept and may travel with it into other international negotiating settings. By analyzing the way in which the term biocultural diversity initiated reaction from delegates negotiating the Summary for Policy Makers of the Pollination Assessment, we illuminate the distribution of authority or symbolic power to determine its meaning and place in the text. We suggest that the weighted concept enables us to explore the forms of knowledge underpinning political order and, in this case, unpack how biocultural diversity challenges the primacy of scientific knowledge by authorizing the place of indigenous knowledge in global biodiversity politics, which initiated attempts to remove or confine its usage in the text.

This article provides a critical analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a boundary organization using Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, and symbolic power. The article combines quantitative, network, and survey data to explore the authorship of Working Group III's contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). These data reveal the dominance of a small group of authors and institutions in the production of knowledge that is represented in the AR5 report, and illuminates how the IPCC's centrality to the field of climate politics is shaping the research and publication strategies of researchers within that field. As a result, the study is able to identify organizational avenues for deepening the involvement and symbolic power of authors from the global South in IPCC assessments of climate change, while empirically, the results of this study lead us to question the IPCC as an assessor of knowledge. Theoretically, it suggests that particularly in the international sphere, the use of the boundary organization concept risks overlooking powerful networks of scientific actors and institutions and their broader implication in the politicization of science.

This article introduces Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of field, interest, and symbolic power into the study of global environmental politics, for the purpose of positioning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the international field of climate politics. Revisiting historical accounts of the IPCC’s establishment, the article explores the IPCC’s role in generating international interest in climate change and the field of forces and struggles that has emerged around the organization and its assessment activities as a result. The IPCC continues to hold a central position within the climate field because of its symbolic power to construct the meaning of climate change. This makes the organization, its assessment activities, and the knowledge it produces central objects of struggle within the climate field, and the forces that this contestation produces structure all aspects of the IPCC and its work. The article identifies how developing-country attitudes, climate skepticism, and bandwagoning impact the IPCC’s place in climate politics and its assessments of the climate problem.

There have been interesting theoretical developments in the study of international environmental problems over the past two decades, as scholars grapple to deal with the complexities and growing range of actors constituting the political realms of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and other forms of environmental degradation (Morin and Orsini 2013). Most recently, Global Environmental Politics (GEP)_ has followed an emerging trend within critical International Relations (IR) that re-focuses scholarly attention on methods and the methodological approaches used to understand, generate knowledge and represent international political life (O’Neil et al. 2013). This chapter aims to review some of the key theoretical and methodological approaches and recent innovations within the field of GEP, and indicate how a turn to the sociology of international environmental relations, in particular the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu, may offer important tools for further unpacking and illuminating the power relations imbued in all international political activities directed at cleaning the planet. This is not only important for providing GEP scholars with critical tools to deconstruct the politics of global environmental degradation, but also because this field offers a key site for understanding patterns of social domination structuring contemporary international political order.

This chapter puts the practice of problematising at the centre of methodological enquiry. In the first part of the chapter, we point to the force that particular problematics or objects of interest exert upon thinking within a disciplinary field, and how we’ve grappled with these forces in our own research trajectories.  We suggest that “security” can be particularly powerful in this regard because as a concept it is deployed both to identify an empirical field of practices and as a central category for the definition of problematics within a field of study. “Security” is readily reified, an “obligatory grid of intelligibility” (Foucault 2008: 3) which sets limits to what – and how much – we can call into question.  Turning from the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to the sorts of scholarly ethos these thinkers embodied, we indicate how this may offer at least as much inspiration as the methods that have been appropriated from their work. Indeed, the way in which the concepts of Bourdieu and Foucault have been inserted within the discipline is often counter to such an ethos, in that they effectively serve to strengthen – rather than diminish – security’s hold on and over the problematisation of politics. 

With this in mind, in the second part of the chapter we set out to explore how greater space may be cultivated between ourselves and our objects of study through the practice of fieldwork. We suggest that in the process of moving between sites, problem-spaces and parameters of intelligibility space may be created from which to reflect upon ready-made objects of study. Rather than approaching fieldwork as a method then, we explore it as an exercise in space-making, examining how the practice of fieldwork as such provides a reference point from which to call into question some of the more readily-available categories used in constructing the research problematic. Finally, we conclude the conversation with some reflections on the struggles over recognition at stake in this sort of intervention.

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This piece describes how I put the thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu into practice through an investigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After briefly outlining Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field and interest, and the practical relation to the world these interrogate, I describe how this approach helped me to reconceptualise the IPCC and its activities as a practice. The term practice of writing is employed as a mode of analysis for exploring how this organisation and its assessment process render climate change practicable to and for social and political reality.

The IPCC has been studied by a diverse range of social science disciplines. The majority of this research focuses on the scientific and political dimensions of the organization and its work, and as such, overlooks other important actors and activities within the IPCC. The lack of understanding surrounding institutional decision-making process and assessment procedures—as well as the social and political forces shaping these—may have left the IPCC vulnerable to recent attacks. Taking a sociological approach and exploring the expertise that make up the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the TSUs, the secretariat and the authors, this study aims to update our knowledge of the organization and the institutional changes it has undergone since its establishment. In doing so, the study offers a closer look at the social dynamics structuring relations within and between IPCC actors and contextualises how the scientific habitus, political order and economic capital shape how and by whom climate change is assessed.

This paper introduces Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field to the study of international environmental politics for the purpose of positioning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the climate field and analysing its relation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Challenging conceptions of the IPCC as an epistemic community and a knowledge provider to the climate regime, this paper explores the IPCC as an assessment practice and identifies the historical development and forms of authority constituting the IPCC’s power to construct the meaning of climate change. It is the IPCC’s power to legitimate meaning that makes the organisation, its assessment activities and the knowledge it produces central objects of interest and struggle within the climate field, and the forces this struggle generates structure all aspects of the IPCC and its work. Unpacking and mapping these forces renders the stakes in the struggle over climate change more transparent and offers new insights for understanding the structuring force that climate ‘deniers’ and ‘bandwagoning’ have in and over the IPCC’s practice of writing climate change.

This scoping paper seeks to explore how the international processes to assess, negotiate and finance climate change adaptation are transforming practices of development and how this can be researched through the field of global health. Specifically, the project aims to explore how climate change adaptation has been adopted by the field of global health and with what implications for the practice of health development at the national, community and household level. Over the past fifteen years, health has held a prominent position on the international agenda (Fidler 2010; Labonte and Gagnon 2012; McInnes and Lee 2006). Climate change poses a challenge to the achievements of the global health field by adding to the burden of disease and by diverting attention away from the global health agenda. The global health community is increasingly integrating itself into international processes for assessing, negotiating and financing climate change adaptation through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). This paper aims to question the implications of this integration for the field of global health and its practices of health development.

This thesis explores how and by whom climate change is written. Although climate change has the potential to impact all ways of life, not all have the power to determine its meaning. In order to identify the actors with the symbolic power to name climate change, the basis of this authority and the activities through which shared environmental problems are named, this thesis examines one of the central sites of meaning production: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Deploying the sociological approach and thinking tools of Pierre Bourdieu, the IPCC is positioned at the centre of the international political struggle over climate change. It is from within this social location that the thesis re-constructs the actors, activities and forms of authority constituting the IPCC’s assessments of climate change as a practice of writing. In order to determine the forces structuring the IPCC’s writing of climate change the thesis identifies the actors that make up the organisation and follows the assessment report along the pathway of its formation. Documenting the report’s construction from the panel’s decision to repeat the assessment process to government approval of the final product reveals the interrelationship and reinforcing nature of scientific, political, economic, and organisational order in the IPCC’s assessment activities. As a result of these forces and the actors they empower, the meaning of climate change is being written in and through the order that generated the problem.