Getting to the Table: Non-State Actors’ Contributions to Inter-state Negotiations – Accessing the Columbia River Treaty Consultations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
States use public consultation processes for civic input in the hope of finding expertise, legitimization, and civic engagement for their policy. Non-state actors in turn see these consultations as a steppingstone for the inclusion of their preferences in inter-state negotiations, but the strategies they use to gain access differ. \nThis thesis fills two gaps in the academic literature by examining the consultation processes in Canada and the United States which prefaced the Columbia River Treaty renegotiations. First, the thesis analyzes how non-state actors are conceptualized and differentiated within the literature as well as synthesizing what strategies they use to gain access to consultations and policymaking. Second, the resulting framework of actors and strategies is applied to the Columbia River Treaty renegotiation consultations to see if such a taxonomy has value in understanding and anticipating how non-state actors enter into governance. Since river systems are at the juncture of strong tensions surrounding economic development, clean water, natural resources, environmental protection, and transportation they provide an ideal site for such an analysis. \nI conduct interviews with 20 state and non-state actors who were part of the Columbia River Treaty consultations as well as examine documentary evidence to uncover the strategies they used to access the consultations. I find that while non-state actors often follow the strategies as anticipated by the framework, they tend to stay within the confines of the state-led consultation processes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".