TY - JOUR
T1 - Narrowing the Climate Field
T2 - The Symbolic Power of Authors in the IPCC's Assessment of Mitigation
AU - Hughes, Hannah Rachel
AU - Paterson, Matthew
N1 - Funding Information:
8 According to IIASA, the GEA “is the first ever fully integrated energy assessment that analyzes energy challenges, opportunities and strategies, for developing, industrialized and emerging econ-omies. It is supported by government and nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations Systems, and the private sector.” See http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/Flagship-Projects/ Global-Energy-Assessment/Home-GEA.en.html, viewed February 8, 2016. It operated much like the IPCC itself, with large chapter teams for each chapter and extended peer-review processes.
Funding Information:
We would like to thank our collaborators Esteve Corbera and Laura Calvet-Mir for allowing us to use data from our earlier paper (Corbera et al., 2016) in this article. We would like to thank Xavier P.-Laberge for excellent research assistance in constructing the dataset on which this article is based. We are grateful to the participants in the workshop on Boundary Organisations in International Politics in Brussels, August 2015 for useful feedback on our paper and stimulating discussion overall, to the anonymous reviewers of the paper, and to the special issue editors, and in particular Amandine Orsini, for her feedback. Some of this research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, under a project entitled “Cultural Politics of Climate Change.”
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Policy Studies Organization
PY - 2017/11/7
Y1 - 2017/11/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - boundary organization
KW - Bourdieu
KW - climate change: mitigation
KW - field
KW - IPCC
KW - knowledge inequalities
KW - symbolic power
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028650969&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ropr.12255
DO - 10.1111/ropr.12255
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85028650969
SN - 1541-132X
VL - 34
SP - 744
EP - 766
JO - Review of Policy Research
JF - Review of Policy Research
IS - 6
ER -