The concept of a global administrative space (GAS) denotes the emergence of administrative structures beyond the territory of the nation state that underpin processes of global governance. Against this backdrop, this chapter argues that an environmental GAS is emerging, which combines the development of independent administrative capacities at the international level with an increasing integration of a broad range of governmental and nongovernmental organizations at different levels of government. The GAS constitutes a complex multilevel and multiactor structure. Based on an original dataset covering issue-specific collaboration and communication flows between organizations operating in the fields of global climate and biodiversity governance, this chapter uses techniques of social network analysis to describe and analyze the structure and composition of administrative networks. It finds a relatively stable pattern of mutual interaction among international environmental bureaucracies, international organizations, national and subnational bureaucracies, research institutes and nongovernmental organizations that can be interpreted as an indicator for the emergence of a GAS in environmental governance.

This chapter reviews the most recent advances in the scholarly literature on international environmental bureaucracies and relates it to the long and fruitful research agenda on international public administrations (IPAs). In the first section, IPAs are defined and distinguished from the wider international organizations or treaty systems that they are an integral part of. The next section addresses the question of whether and how IPAs should be expected to matter in global environmental governance. It then presents selected empirical studies that find IPAs to have had an autonomous, discernible influence on international policy processes and outputs. The last section identifies the most relevant determinants and causal mechanisms of IPA influence and shows how the chapters in the book contribute to this continuously evolving research agenda.

As the configuration of global environmental governance has become more complex over the past fifty years, numerous scholars have underscored the importance of understanding the transnational networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that comprise it. Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) is a relational methodology that aims to capture the dynamics of these constantly shifting networks. CEE draws on multisited, team, and institutional ethnography to assemble teams of researchers to study major international conferences, which offer important political spaces where these networks can be observed. Drawing on more than ten years of experience with CEE, we argue that strong approaches to collaboration offer rich opportunities for analyses of global environmental governance. In CEE, researchers collaborate on all aspects of the research process, from research design to analysis to writing. The aim of this chapter is to introduce CEE, providing a history of its development, reviewing the benefits and challenges of CEE, reflecting on the theoretical insights generated through CEE in relation to understanding environmental agreement-making, and offering practical guidance for researchers interested in using the methodology. Going beyond CEE, the chapter also considers collaboration in the context of the broader scholarly landscape.

What does it mean to engage ethnography in the study of global environmental politics, particularly at sites of global agreement-making? This chapter explores how different forms of ethnography, including traditional field-based, digital, visual, and spatial approaches, can uncover and interrogate the hidden dynamics that shape the production of global environmental governance. The chapter introduces readers to how ethnographic approaches to these sites have inspired new ways of asking questions about global environmental politics. It considers the opportunities and challenges of adopting transdisciplinary and feminist approaches to ethnography, both in terms of practical concerns in the field and broader disciplinary concerns. It further provides a toolkit for designing ethnographic research with significant attention to the ethical dimensions of ethnography, from project conception through to results communication and data stewardship across the life of the project.

This chapter assesses the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on global governance. We start by discussing the range of expectations for global governance arrangements, considering the stated objectives of the goals. We then assess the early performance of governance arrangements in terms of shifts in policy and practice against these expectations. Our research shows the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals is largely discursive, with limited transformative outcomes on governance practices. The High-level Political Forum, created to assess global progress towards the implementation of the goals, has failed to provide political leadership and promote coherence across the United Nations system. Our research also shows that the Sustainable Development Goals initiated peer-learning among governments and other actors, yet with limited evidence that this has led to structural transformation towards sustainability. As certain ambitions of the Global Goals have been part of ongoing debates in global governance, our review finally highlights that observable changes often reflect long-term reform trajectories that are not causally linked to the launch of the goals.

This chapter focuses on the environmental diplomacy surrounding the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the “Brundtland Commission.” This process popularized the concept of sustainable development. The chapter begins by detailing the substantial changes seen in international environmental conditions through the mid-1980s, brought about largely by the Third World Debt crisis. These shifts created a rapidly deteriorating global environmental context and necessitated significant changes in institutional arrangements. The need for institutional change was a central finding of the important 1987 “Brundtland report,” titled Our Common Future. The Brundtland Commission highlighted a rapid deterioration in the world environment and underlined the need for major institutional change. Some actors sought to realize such change at the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, when the report and its call for action were presented to world leaders. Coordination was hindered, however, by divergent expectations and the absence of a Temporal Focal Point. While states were incentivized to cooperate rapidly to address problems in global environmental governance, the institutional status quo prevailed.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.