NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 5 | OCTOBER 2015 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange 899 The Pope's climate change encyclical is more than a call for action. It is an example of how disparate communities, from religion, the physical and social sciences, can coalesce around a common goal.

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 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 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.

Scholarship on global environmental assessments call for these organisations to become more reflexive to address challenges around participation, inclusivity of perspectives, and responsivity to the policy domains they inform. However, there has been less call for reflexivity in IPCC scholarship or closer examination of how routine concepts condition scholarly understanding by focusing on science and politics over other social dynamics. In this article, I suggest that scholarly reflexivity could advance new analytical approaches that provide practical insights for changing organisational structures. Through reflecting on my understanding of the IPCC, I develop actors, activities, and forms of authority as a new analytical framework for studying international organisations and knowledge bodies. Through its application, I describe the social order of the IPCC within and between the panel, the bureau, the technical support units, the secretariat and the authors, which is revealing of which actors, on the basis of what authority, have symbolic power over the writing of climate change. The fine-grained analysis of organisations enabled by this analytical framework reveals how dominance can and is being remade through intergovernmental relations and potentially, identifies avenues that managers of these bodies can pursue to challenge it.