Created in 1972, the United Nations’ environmental programme (UNEP) provides expertise to
the United Nations organized by seven thematic subprogrammes and works with professionals
to conduct that mandate. Yet, the literatures in International Relations (IR) and Global
Environmental Politics (GEP) do not engage with UNEP’s expertise and its professionals and
rather choose to study scientific and technical advice provided by expert groups and panels such
as the IPCC or IPBES. More specifically, we know little about the sociology of professions in
the field of global environment at the United Nations.
Borrowing from Science, Technology and Society (STS) and International Political Sociology
(IPS) literatures, new research avenues can be explored to understand the fabric of UNEP’s
expertise through the circulation of experts and knowledge. How do these experts work with
and within the United Nations to provide advice on environmental issues? This paper offers an
analysis of their career and networks through a study of UNEP’s expertise. It provides
knowledge of how experts work and engage with UNEP’s mandate through science-policy
interfaces. It examines more specifically how these experts makes sense of and participate to
the conduct of UNEP’s mandate. Using a network analysis of 254 experts and a sociology of
professions relying on semi-structured interviews of 23 of them, it proposes a typology of their
professional ethos.
The typology identifies the career’s organizational principle that drives experts’ engagement
with UNEP’s mandate. The first type is scholar experts who are custodians of a specific know-
how acquired through their training and offered during their career to organizations. Secondly,
nomadic experts are driven by the cause they defend through organizations. Finally, the third
type is sedentary experts because they organize their career within the range of international
institutions’ bureaucratic permanent positions. Each of these type of career reveals the
characteristics of a professional ethos that uncover practices of reflexive-monitoring of UNEP’s
mandate. These practices demonstrate that experts’ role go beyond simply giving advice to
policymakers because they engage more than a piece of advice when they organize their career
with the mandate of UNEP.
