Browsing by Author "Boyer, Dominic C"

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    Climate Politics and its Magic Mirrors: Service-Power, Political Imagination, and the United Nations Climate Convention
    (2023-04-17) O Agnesar-Sigurdsson, Magnus; Boyer, Dominic C
    The Paris Agreement is not an agreement to end all climate negotiations. Rather, it inaugurates a long century of negotiations and decision-making on the transboundary implications of greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do international and multilateral civil servants enable the global climate regime. They are a key but understudied component of it. Their work—which the study concludes by describing as near-political—has dealt with climate policy and programming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for over thirty years. Based on ethnographic research at the UN Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, from 2017–2020, the study focuses on a particular figuration of power, imagination, and white-collar labor, significant to a political process and global response. It analyzes the work of two key sets of interlocutors within this bureaucratic site:—1) Secretariat staff providing negotiation support and 2) staff of a recent project on climate-related development hosted at the Secretariat—which together demonstrate the atmospheres of climate politics at a supranational level. Working alongside them, participating in internal and external meetings as well as annual climate negotiations, gives insight into their uncertain and haphazard opportunities to control and influence the political processes they oversee and convene. Two concepts stand at the center of the analysis: service-power and political imagination. Conceptualizing service-power draws out staff’s ability to affect politics by proximity to political authority (delegates, ministerial staff, ministers). Service-power involves constantly working on knowledge of political situations understood as political imagination. With accelerated climate change steadily becoming a central and crosscutting topic of Eurocentric and neo-colonial statecraft and development cooperation, the study argues that capturing the political imagination under the UN climate regime is becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, the study questions the continuing usefulness of vertical hierarchies and secrets to create atmospheres of importance around organization and decision-making within international climate politics. Near-political workers are a significant part of a political process understood as a translation from political will to political practice. They represent a group caught in the middle of attempts to imagine new politics born out of the challenges of the Anthropocene.'