Cultivated ties and strategic communication: do international environmental secretariats tailor information to increase their bureaucratic reputation?

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars and policy-makers in the interplay of international bureaucracies with civil society organizations, other non-profit entities, and the private sector. This article extends the state of research by investigating whether and how secretariats try to strengthen their reputation within their respective policy regimes through information provision and alliance building. Based on reputation theory, the article argues that ties cultivated with stakeholders as well as appearance and presentation of information are decisive in this regard. Methodologically, the study implements a mixed methods design that combines a quantitative survey with social network analysis, and qualitative content analysis of interviews with stakeholders within the climate and biodiversity regime. We show that the secretariats of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) maintain relationships with a wide range of state and non-state actors to enhance their reputation. Moreover, different types of actors receive different types of information from the two secretariats studied. Our findings reveal that both secretariats use their limited resources for investing strategically into networks with different types of actors (in the broader transnational policy network), either via the tailored provision of information or through strategic networking with multipliers. They also indicate that reputation does not simply depend on characteristics of bureaucracies, but also on framework conditions and different communication strategies.

Introduction

“…Recently, innovative methodological approaches, combining quantitative social network analysis (SNA) with qualitative case studies, have been developed to overcome the methodological challenge of identifying the policy preferences of international secretariats. By focusing on issue-specific information flows between international bureaucracies and other actors in the global climate and biodiversity policy networks, these studies offer the potential to look behind the scenes of multilateral environmental negotiations and to trace the policy outputs of IOs or multilateral treaty systems back to IPA action Kolleck 2021, 2022;Goritz et al 2020;Jörgens, Kolleck, and Saerbeck 2016;Mederake et al 2021).…”

Environmental Treaty Secretariats as Attention-Seeking Bureaucracies

“…This section has shown that, so far, the culmination of the climate secretariat's indirect attention-seeking behavior is the described effort leading to the Paris Agreement. Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement the secretariat has continuously sought the attention of citizens and policymakers (Mederake et al 2021;) and invested into a targeted communication strategy, increasingly online and via social media channels (UNFCCC 2020). Engaging with youth stakeholders represented by prominent persons such as Greta Thunberg fitted especially well into the strategy of including nonparty stakeholders as an integral pillar of the post-2015 climate regime (Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola 2021).…”

“…Our explorative study indicates that the secretariat of the CBD seeks the attention of a wide range of stakeholders outside of the convention on specific issues discussed under the framework of the CBD. It is the hub of a widespread stakeholder network, allowing secretarial staff to act as a knowledge brokers and enabling it to drive negotiations forward from the outside (see also Hickmann and Elsässer 2020;Mederake et al 2021). In its increasing integration of nonstate actors into the CBD process, the secretariat follows a broader trend in global environmental and sustainability governance of collaborating with transnational actors (Kok and Ludwig 2022;Pattberg, Widerberg, and Kok 2019).…”