Bureaucratic Organizations in International Environmental Governance: Administering "Our Common Future"? Paper prepared for the 2005 Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change: International Organizations and Global
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Embedded in an interdisciplinary qualitative research framework on organizational effectiveness, this paper explores the specific role of treaty secretariats— conceptualized as a distinct type of intergovernmental organizations—in international environmental politics. Although the relevance of bureaucratic actors in international negotiations, rule-setting and implementation has been acknowledged by a number of scholars, social science research still lacks theoretical distinction and empirical scrutiny in understanding just when and how intergovernmental organizations affect these processes in the international arena. In international environmental governance, in particular, the number of intergovernmental treaties has soared in the past decades, thus rendering it a highly dynamic and interesting area for social science research. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper employs organizational theories and sociological institutionalism for qualitative case study research. Empirically, the paper assesses variances at the outcome level of four environmental treaty secretariats, namely the secretariats to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. While the organizational design of all four secretariats is similar, their institutional histories and political influence differ markedly. Our research addresses in particular the variation in the normative outcome of the secretariats' activities, i.e. its rule- setting functions. From a larger set of variables the paper emphasizes the salience of autonomy and authority as well as leadership in exploring intergovernmental treaty secretariats' capacities to influence rule-setting and compliance in their respective treaty regimes. Drawing on an on-going multiyear research effort within the Global Governance Project (glogov.org), the paper brings together scholarly perspectives from political science, management studies and International Relations theories. **
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".