This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

This chapter describes why the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proven such a great challenge for the representation of women and women’s interests. Some progress has been made since the Aid-for-Trade programme, which cooperates with the WTO, incorporated gender mainstreaming in 2011. This includes the adoption of the 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment and the inauguration of the WTO Gender Research Hub in 2021. Nevertheless, to date the WTO has lagged behind other international organizations, including organizations of global economic governance, in representing women and their interests. The chapter posits the following reasons in historical context: (i) Women did not ‘get in on the ground floor’ at the WTO; (ii) The locus of power at the WTO rests with the members (exemplified by the requirement for consensus and the ’single undertaking’, the importance of member proposals, and the institutional weakness of the Secretariat); (iii) The relative lateness and weakness of WTO involvement with civil society, compared to other institutions of global economic governance; (iv) The formative clashes during the 1980s and 1990s between gender and trade activism and trade liberalization; (v) The lex specialis nature of the WTO dispute settlement system; (vi) The WTO is primarily a ‘hard-law’ institution.

Richard Kinley provides an account from the vantage point of the UNFCCC Secretariat, where he served as Deputy Executive Secretary from 2006 to 2017. First, he describes the role of the “Climate Change Secretariat” in supporting the intergovernmental process with coordination, communication, and information sharing. Second, Kinley recounts the Secretariat’s work in preparing COP 21, emphasizing how an effective and collegial collaboration between the Secretariat and the French Presidency in the years leading up to Paris helped set the stage for a successful conference. Kinley also discusses how to maintain a “party-driven process”, the role of the Secretariat in managing the negotiating text, and how to handle the challenges of meeting schedules and logistics. Third, he analyzes how the Secretariat managed the intergovernmental process during the Paris Conference in 2015, combining a discussion of procedural solutions and tools, such as the “Comité de Paris”, with a detailed and dramatic account of how member states managed to go from a situation where “everything was on the table”, to identify a compromise solution that could be adopted by the plenary.

This chapter discusses the ways in which States and IOs need to continue engaging with the treaty throughout its life. It illustrates continuing engagement at the domestic or internal level and on the international plane, and how these processes interact with each other. It focuses on issues arising from engagement with treaty institutions such as Conference of Parties, reporting requirements in treaties, the role of treaty secretariats and compliance mechanisms. It also looks at continuing engagement with treaty acts, in particular the handling of amendments, reservations and declarations by other parties, and interpretation and application of treaties by domestic courts.

The new opportunities, experiences, and limits of liberal internationalist order produced a distinctive kind of feminist-internationalist genre, the internationalist typewriter fiction. The bestselling novelist Rose Macaulay, Hogarth Press intimate Alice Ritchie, journalist and novelist Winifred Holtby, also Virginia Woolf: all wrote of clerks, secretaries, and typists at liberal internationalist offices during the postwar period, for a feminist audience both dependent on and resistant to empire. These fictions contest the familiar modernist trope of the passive “typist home at teatime,” as in Eliot and Conrad, and open up new ways to read the textual traces of liberal governance. Feminist depictions of liberal world order, particularly in the Mandate territories of Africa, allow us to track the complex network of paperwork, romance, and race that organized neo-imperial rule under the Mandate system. Depictions of typists and office work also allow us a new way into reading the imaginative life of the new technical-managerial economic order that rose to increasing prominence between the wars.