Magnus Sigurdsson

MAGNUS O. SIGURDSSON, then a graduate student at Rice University, Houston, Texas, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Behind the Scenes of the Paris Agreement: Service-Power, International Civil Servants and the UNFCCC,’ supervised by Dr. Dominic C. Boyer. A human response to climate change, understood as a globally orchestrated process, relies on the meaning-making and operation of international and multilateral agreements between nation states and also trans/international organizations. These agreements are made procedurally possible by impartially functioning middle-people that service and support an institutional structure which enables the political and technopolitical actors to reach agreements and put them into force. Through ethnographic fieldwork at the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany, working alongside its officers and specialists, the daily tasks, internal and external friction, and cultural imaginaries of this group of service and support staff came into view. Their work on a multinational framework for policy and planning of climate action is tangled up in more easily imagined and understood aspirations for on-the-ground climate action while their procedural and bureaucratic tasks are largely withdrawn from such realities. The abstract conditions of their work against a backdrop of unprecedented urgency and broader public demand for action on climate change starkly outlines a largely unnoticed group of professionals black-boxed within political systems and brings to light a political conceptualization of service that is ripe with significance, responsibility, and paradoxes.