Assessing the influence of international environmental treaty secretariats using a relational network approach

Abstract

The influential role of international treaty secretariats in coordinating bureaucracies across jurisdictional boundaries has been highlighted in recent years. While we now better understand how their influence occurs, the field still faces a substantial difficulty in answering the basic quantitative question of “how influential?” By employing network analysis, we devised and tested a survey to quantify secretariat influence within an international environmental regime. We applied the survey tool to two transboundary fisheries governance networks in North America and here focus on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) as our primary case study. The results demonstrate a high ability of treaty secretariat to influence the management decisions of federal and state/provincial agencies. Primary interview data collected with the GLFC secretariat staff helps explain this finding. This study advances the reconceptualization of secretariat influence via relational metrics, and offers a way to estimate secretariat influence despite their typically veiled modes of operation.

Keywords

• Environmental politics
• International organizations
• Fisheries governance
• Policy network
• Public administration
• Pacific salmon commission