Project Details
Projekt
Behind the Scenes: Understanding the Hidden Influence of Treaty Secretariats on International Environmental Policy-making
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 198360606
The ENVIPA project explores how and under what circumstances international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on the processes and outputs of major international conferences. We do so by focusing on the role and impact of the secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). This is a “least likely case” for administrative influence in international policy-making, given that convention secretariats have limited human and financial resources and rather circumscribed mandates in comparison to the IPAs commonly studied, such as the EU, the OECD, and the World Bank.In particular, we aim to uncover those instances of secretariat influence that scholars have described as invisible (Mathiason 2007), taking place behind the scenes (Bauer 2006: 33), or covered by a “veil of legitimacy” provided by the conference chair (Depledge 2005: 66). Thus far, this hidden component of secretariat activity has largely been omitted in studies on the influence of secretariats; such studies have instead focused on overt cases in which secretariats have launched “aggressive marketing campaigns” (Jinnah 2011: 24) or have “publicly promoted” specific discourses (Conliffe 2011: 46). Using social network analysis as our main methodological approach to visualise the “invisible”, we go beyond previous research on IPA influence. Accordingly, we expect our findings to allow a reassessment of the influence levels currently attributed to the secretariats of major environmental conventions (Bauer 2009; Busch 2009; Siebenhüner 2009). On a more general scale, we expect our study to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role and influence of international public administrations in world politics.Based on this reassessment, we will then identify the conditions under which convention secretariats are able to transcend the predominantly instrumental role originally assigned to them and become partially autonomous actors in their own right. In so doing, we will draw on hypotheses and concepts developed in accounts of IPA activity rooted in principal-agent theory, sociological institutionalism, and organisational theory. Our study will put assumed causal mechanisms to a rigorous test and thus contribute to further theory building.
DFG Programme
Research Units
