Does Bureaucracy Really Matter? The Authority of Intergovernmental Treaty Secretariats in Global Environmental Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although a number of scholars acknowledge the relevance of intergovernmental bureaucracies in world politics, International Relations research still lacks theoretical distinction and empirical scrutiny in understanding their influence in the international arena. In this article I explore the role of intergovernmental treaty secretariats as authoritative bureaucratic actors in global environmental politics. I employ organizational theories and sociological institutionalism for comparative qualitative case study research that traces variances at the outcome level of two environmental treaty secretariats, the secretariats to the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol (“Ozone Secretariat”) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (“Desertification Secretariat”). While the organizational design of both secretariats is similar, their institutional histories and outcomes differ markedly. Looking for possible explanations for these differences I focus on the activities of both secretariats and how they relate to the authority they enjoy vis-à-vis the parties they serve.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".