Using a dynamic version of the principal–agent model this chapter develops a theoretical framework for an international bureaucracy’s influence on the delegation of responsibilities by the organization’s member states. It argues that this influence is reinforced by external resource flows that both directly and indirectly strengthen the role of the bureaucracy. The chapter uses the case of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to test the hypotheses since its major resource flows have been driven solely by a private market for emissions credits, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Between 2006 and 2013 when CDM revenues formed a significant share of the secretariat’s budget, rule-setting was increasingly dominated by the secretariat. When the crash of prices for CDM credits from 2012 onward reduced the secretariat’s revenues and projects to assess, secretariat-led rule-setting intensified. This approach was used to “buy time” in which secretariat leaders were hoping for a recovery of the CDM market. But when this recovery did not materialize, the secretariat started to lay off support staff and implicitly tried to reorient CDM resources for support of the Paris Agreement negotiations and implementation of national mitigation action.

State parties to multilateral environmental agreements establish secretariats to undertake tasks required for the efficient operation of the treaty body. A key area of responsibility for secretariats is the organization of meetings of Conferences of the Parties (COPs), during which state parties negotiate the ongoing work and focus of the treaty, including the budget that the secretariat can access for its activities during the subsequent year(s). A close examination of the decision-making process and structures for these budgets offers a window into the principal–agent relationship between member states and secretariats. This examination explores a mechanism through which the principals (states) exercise authority over the cognitive, normative, and executive influence of secretariats (agents), while at the same time demonstrating that these agents are seeking such influence in the first place. The chapter explores the negotiation dynamics regarding the budgets for the Rio Conventions – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention of Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification – as well as budget dilemmas faced by two multilateral scientific bodies to explore the accountability mechanism that are brought to the relationship between member states and secretariats.

Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.

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 conceptualizes international public administrations (IPAs) as attention-seeking bureaucracies whose goal is to actively feed their policy-relevant information into the multilateral decision-making process. It suggests two avenues through which international treaty secretariats can attempt to influence international negotiations: (a) Secretariats may attempt to supply policy-relevant information to negotiators from the inside via their close cooperation with the chairs of multilateral negotiations or (b) they may attempt to build support for their preferred policy outputs by engaging with and communicatively connecting actors within the broader transnational policy network in order to exert pressure on negotiators from the outside. Taking the secretariats of the Convention of Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as examples, these potential pathways of secretariat influence are illustrated and explored empirically. The findings contribute to a growing body of literature that studies the role of national and international public administrations as agenda-setters, policy entrepreneurs, or policy brokers at the interface of public policy analysis and public administration.

This concluding chapter summarizes key findings of the chapters in this book and relates them to the seminal work Managers of Global Change: The Influence of International Environmental Bureaucracies by Frank Biermann and Bernd Siebenhüner. The chapter highlights changes in the strategies and causal mechanisms of international public administration influence in the environmental field and in the analytic concepts used to study international bureaucracies. It concludes by outlining the contours of future research in this still expanding academic field.

This chapter focuses on the United Nation’s largest development entity, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and asks: When and why has it integrated climate adaptation into its mandate? It traces UNDP’s evolving adaptation mandate from 1990 to 2015, drawing on over fifty interviews and an extensive analysis of primary documents. It argues that UNDP Administrators, rather than states, played a critical role in mandate expansion. Administrators decided whether and how to integrate adaptation into UNDP’s mandate and subsequently lobbied states to endorse any expansion. It also suggests that UNDP’s expansion was facilitated by its early access to multilateral climate trust funds. This chapter makes an important contribution to existing theories of international bureaucracies, which often assume that organizational change is state-driven (statist explanations) or that bureaucracies will always seek to expand (principal–agent and constructivism). Overall, it suggests scholars should look at how leaders navigate financial, ideational, and normative environment to understand change and influence in international institutions.

International secretariats have increasingly turned toward orchestration as a mode of governance. This chapter analyzes the normative dimensions associated with orchestration, such as democratic values related to participation, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. It argues that orchestration as an indirect mode of governance muddles who should be held accountable for which actions, to which set of standards, and which agents have the right to demand said accountability. Orchestrators need to ensure that their own actions, and those of intermediaries, are democratically legitimated by affected stakeholders. The chapter applies this argument to orchestration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat. While previous research on orchestration of the UNFCCC has predominantly focused on effectiveness nonstate action, this chapter shows how and why nonstate climate action requires democratic legitimation. It concludes by discussing the intrinsic and instrumental importance of evaluating orchestration through a democratic legitimacy lens and the implications for international secretariats.

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.

This chapter investigates how formal autonomy and informal administrative working styles of international public administrations (IPAs) are interrelated empirically. Recent research on IPAs identified a paradoxical constellation. Some IPAs with low structural autonomy, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Secretariat, are able to compensate this restriction by developing an entrepreneurial administrative style with emphasis on initiating new policies and sound internal management (paradox of weakness). Other IPAs, such as the formally autonomous European Commission, were found to anticipate member state control and voluntarily restrict themselves to a more passive servant style (paradox of strength). This finding raises the question whether the two paradoxes are idiosyncratic features of the two cases or a more universal phenomenon of international bureaucracies. To answer this question, this chapter introduces the concepts of structural autonomy and administrative styles and lay out a strategy for their measurement. It compares the empirical pattern of autonomy and style in eight IPAs. It concludes with some propositions about potential consequence for international bureaucratic influence.