Climate Justice and Organizational Technologies for the Implementation of the Paris Agreement

• In Event: How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - III

Abstract

The implementation of the Paris Agreement involves extensive relations of organization and planning, which rely on the collaboration of different bureaucratic entities, such as international secretariats, international organizations, NGOs, and national ministries. The collaboration relies on myriad coordination techniques which can be defined as organizational technologies, such as partnerships, alliances, standardized documentation, workshops/meetings, and international policy mechanisms. An integral element of the functionality of this messy apparatus or dispositif is the technical, political, and diplomatic labor carried out by support staff; civil servants and other specialists. Based on ethnographic data collected within secretariats servicing the global climate regime, this paper focuses on the everyday practices of support staff working on coordination in "developing" countries, situating itself in a crosscutting field of STS-influenced research on governance. The labor itself is multi-dimensional and supports the production of prolonged series of outputs which can be gathered under the hat of objective finalities referred to as "climate action". One of the fundamental aims of these objective finalities is targeting inequalities as the Paris Agreement should be "implemented to reflect equity [...] in the light of different national circumstances". However, in day-to-day coordination work the underlying equity issues are seldom on staffers' minds but much rather providing proper diplomatic service for the government officials in the "developing countries" they work with. In the paper, I seek to answer the question how values of social/climate justice, get lost in, transferred to, or translated in the specific coordination practices of organizational technologies of international climate governance.

Author

• Magnús Örn Sigurðsson, Rice University