TY - JOUR
T1 - Weighting the world
T2 - IPBES and the struggle over biocultural diversity
AU - Hughes, Hannah
AU - Vadrot, Alice B.M.
N1 - Funding Information:
* Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the Sustainable Places Research Institute, Univer-sity of Cardiff, in 2016; the Political Ecology Group, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, in 2016; the ISA Annual Convention in 2017; the Knowledge Societies research group, University of Vienna, in 2017; the International Politics Department at Aberystwyth Uni-versity in 2018; and the UC Berkeley workshop on the special section in 2018. We are grateful to all participants and for all comments received at these events. A big thank-you in particular goes to Aleksandar Rankovic, the authors of the special section—Peter Haas, Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, Kate O’Neill, Matthew Paterson, Jonathan Pickering, and Laura Zanotti—as well as the reviewers and GEP team for all their hard work and thoughtful comments. Alice B. M. Vadrot’s research was supported by an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship (J-3704) from the Austrian Science Fund. Hannah Hughes’ research was supported by the School of Law and Politics, and by early career support from Cardiff University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
PY - 2019/5/1
Y1 - 2019/5/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067926535&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/glep_a_00503
DO - 10.1162/glep_a_00503
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85067926535
SN - 1526-3800
VL - 19
SP - 14
EP - 37
JO - Global Environmental Politics
JF - Global Environmental Politics
IS - 2
ER -