Inside international environmental organizations. Negotiating the greening of international politics

Abstract

From the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, environmental politics were not only put increasingly on domestic agendas, but also dealt with in international regimes and organizations (IOs). The rise of environmental IOs has led to the expectation of a greening of international politics and a corresponding contribution to improved environmental standards around the globe. This paper opens the black box of environmental negotiations in IOs and examines how active the various IO member states participate in the process of deciding upon international environmental rules and norms. This reveals two interesting empirical puzzles that the paper examines in a theory-guided methodological sound manner. First, many states joined environmental IOs and contribute to them through membership fees, but nevertheless often fail to make use of their formal right to voice positions in international environmental negotiations. Second, some states are considerably more outspoken than others, although articulating one’s position is important for the chances to influence international environmental policies. The paper argues that the former is due to lack of capabilities, while the latter is due to differences in the saliency of environmental topics across states.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributor

Diana Panke is Professor of Political Science with a Chair in ‘Multi-Level Governance’ at University of Freiburg. Her research interests include international negotiations, international norms, multilateral diplomacy, comparative regionalism, institutional design of international organizations, small states in international affairs, governance beyond the nation state, European Union politics as well as compliance and legalization. In these fields, she has published several monographs and more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Or up to four per year for those IOs and regimes in which meetings did not take place as frequently.

2 Apart from these formal negotiations, states can also interact in preparatory arenas (working groups) and informal settings, such as coffee and other breaks or receptions. Yet, since there are no protocols or minutes available on for preparatory meetings and informal talk and since neither interviews nor participant observation or other ethnographic methods of data collection would allow to obtain systematic and reliable information about how often which state voices positions in these settings, only statements made in the formal negotiation arena can be included in this study.

3 The absolute and relative measures of activity correlate highly (Figure 1 and Table 2) and country statements do not cluster in specific negotiations or IOs per se. Thus, it is not the case that a member state is very vocal in one IO is member of and silent in another.

4 Robustness checks revealed that all findings remain robust, irrespective of whether bivariate models are run, or whether the full models are run with a subsample of UNFCCC, UNEP and ITTO only.