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Fig. A.1. Interjurisdictional communication pattern for governance networks pertaining to the Northern Panel of the Pacific salmon fisheries.
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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 netwo...
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Emerging in the 21st century, Network Science provides practical measures to interpret a system's interactions between the components and their links. Literature has focused on countries' interconnections on the final goods, but its application on the value-added from a network perspective in trade is still imitated. This paper applies network scie...
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... Next, we conducted a social network analysis (SNA) with the 161 references to expertise (Paterson 2019(Paterson , 2023Zachary 1977) to explore the underlying patterns of states' strategic references. This methodological approach is informed by literature on regime complexes that in recent years, owing to the inclusion of a myriad of international actors, has guided researchers toward using system-theoretic approaches, such as network analysis (Morin et al. 2017;Scott 2015;Song et al. 2020) and complexity theory (Morin et al. 2017;Orsini et al. 2019), or a combination of approaches (Kim 2013;Kim and Mackey 2014). The network approach is widely applied in the field of global environmental governance, as "networks allow us to study the decentralization and fragmentation of governance arrangements, with power and authority widely diffused" (Barros-Platiau et al. 2019, 2). ...
... The network approach is widely applied in the field of global environmental governance, as "networks allow us to study the decentralization and fragmentation of governance arrangements, with power and authority widely diffused" (Barros-Platiau et al. 2019, 2). Its focus on relations means that "social network analysis permits analysing the multiple interconnections among the various legal instruments, organizations, and public and private actors in regime complexes" (Gomez-Mera et al. 2020, 10) to explore questions relating to new forms of power in international governance (Hafner-Burton and Montgomery 2006), for example, when assessing the influence of IO secretariats (Song et al. 2020). We use SNA as an analytical tool to study the politics of expert authority, focusing on the structure of interactions in the negotiations. ...
The negotiations for a new instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of high-seas marine biodiversity (marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction; BBNJ) finally concluded after difficult negotiations. The BBNJ negotiations had to address a regime complex of sectoral and regional organizations regulating different aspects of marine biodiversity and a political struggle about the epistemologies that ought to inform marine biodiversity governance, which is driven by limited, unequally distributed, and contested knowledge. However, to be implemented, the new BBNJ Agreement will have to be equipped with expert authority to be able to address these challenges and make competent statements about the state of high-seas marine biodiversity. We address a gap in empirical work on expert authority in the regime complex by analyzing state references to the expertise of different international organizations in the BBNJ negotiations. Combining collaborative event ethnography and social network analysis, we show that states strategically and politically refer to the expertise of international organizations, and we coin the term authority shopping to describe this behavior.
... Contrary to absolute decline, indicators of relative decline do not readily appear in the standard IO datasets. We are only aware of a few datasets that include IOs as actual actors, but these are restricted to specific governance fields (Grigorescu 2010;Holzscheiter et al. 2020;Song et al. 2020). 7 This makes it difficult to provide definite statements on the validity of the concept of relative decline. ...
Many international organisations (IOs) are currently challenged, yet are they also in decline? Despite much debate on the crisis of liberal international order, contestation, loss of legitimacy, gridlock, pathologies and exiting member states, there is little research on IO decline. This article seeks to clarify this concept and argues that decline can be considered in absolute and relative terms. Absolute decline involves a decrease in the number of IOs and their authority, membership and output, whereas relative decline concerns a decrease in the centrality of IOs in international relations. Reviewing a wide range of indicators, this article argues that, whereas there is limited decline in absolute terms since 1945, there may well be important decline in relative terms. Relative decline is more difficult to measure, but to probe its significance this article presents data from speeches during the United Nations General Assembly General Debate. It shows that IOs were most often mentioned in 1996 and that there has been a decline since. These findings indicate that, whereas IOs might survive as institutions, they are decreasingly central to international relations.
... In the high seas, 1 where 34.2% of all fished species are considered overfished [24], Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) 2 are responsible for sustainably managing marine living resources through the implementation of ecosystem-based approaches and ensuring adequate inter-jurisdictional cooperation [30,26,23]. RFMOs are international organizations (IOs) established by member states to coordinate their bureaucracies in an effort to realize collective outcomes, generally with the administrative support of an international treaty secretariat [31,73]. They are known to face many organizational challenges, with their effectiveness being regularly questioned [16,31]. ...
... While there has already been considerable scholarship on the political processes involved with the creation and function of IOs in different policy contexts [43], there has been less focus on the bureaucrats and agencies involved in administering IOs, including secretariates. This is surprising, given that recent research suggests they can have considerable influence in treaty implementation, shaping power relations between states through distributing and building capacity, framing problems and disseminating information used in decision-making [40,73]. ...
Inter-organizational collaboration is often considered essential to transboundary fishery governance, due, in part, to the high levels of task interdependence, the remote and often treacherous conditions, and the limited levels of information available to any policy actor on resource status. In the high seas, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) are responsible for sustainably managing highly migratory and straddling fish stocks through the implementation of ecosystem-based approaches and ensuring adequate inter-jurisdictional cooperation. A central question facing RFMO governance is therefore how to structure and sustain inter-organizational transboundary collaboration under high uncertainty? This paper presents the case of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO), conceptualized as a strategic alliance between the bureaucratic organizations responsible for north Atlantic salmon fishery management in the member countries. We identify and explain how dimensions of trust, control, and perceived risk have structured the collaborative performance of the alliance. The application of an integrated trust-control-risk framework increases conceptual clarity for how, when and why alliance managers might seek to develop different forms of trust through different management control systems in ways that further multi-actor collaborative network performance. Future research needs are identified, including better understanding how managerial strategies and control mechanisms facilitate inter-organizational trust in transboundary governance settings and mitigate the perceived risks of working together.
... The current Science Transfer Program is coordinated by a commission secretariat staff member who dedicates more than 50% of their time to the program, with at least a half-dozen other staff members across commission directorates contributing as needed to shepherd projects through the process (Fig. 3). The influence of secretariat staff in facilitating process, bridging groups, and influencing outcomes is critical to successful program implementation (Song et al. 2020) and extends through many of the subsequent success factors described below. ...
Research results are often not easily accessible or readily digestible for decision-making by natural resource managers. This knowledge-action gap is due to various factors including the time lag between new knowledge generation and its transfer, lack of formal management structures, and institutional inertia to its uptake. Herein, we reflect on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s Science Transfer Program and its evolution from ‘Mode 1’ (i.e., scientists conduct research autonomously) toward ‘Mode 2’ (i.e., co-production of knowledge with practitioners) knowledge production to understand and overcome the knowledge-action gap. Six success factors and strategies and tactics used to achieve those factors were critical to the shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2: (1) dedicate funding and staff support; (2) obtain top-down commitment from organizational leadership; (3) break down silos; (4) build relationships through formal and informal interactions; (5) emphasize co-production in program and project implementation; and (6) obtain buy-in among relevant actors. By way of three project case studies, we highlight knowledge transfer approaches, products, and lessons learned. We anticipate this contribution will benefit those working on knowledge mobilization, particularly in boundary-spanning organizations, and those involved in resource program management, administration, and design; it is also intended for resource managers seeking to have their science and information needs met more effectively.
Environmental international treaties and multilateral agreements are complex arenas for cooperation between parties with the overarching goal of promoting our society’s environmental sustainability. International environmental protocols or treaties can be seen as communities that work together to achieve common environmental goals. To analyze the dynamic landscape of international cooperation in environmental protection in the last decades, we compared the cooperation established between the international parties that ratified the most important environmental treaties by continent and assessed the implications for transboundary environmental issues. Network analyses uncover clusters of the most popular and important international environmental treaties and the most influential brokers at the continental level in promoting environmental sustainability across borders. We further analyzed the structural patterns in international environmental protection to identify key promoters of cooperation, most collaborative countries, and most important environmental issues tackled by international agreements by considering the party’s continent as an attribute. Given the growing environmental issues over the past few decades—including the effects of climate change, future strategies must consider missing elements leading to improper environmental agreements implementation and the emergence of cross-border issues. Our results illustrate current networks’ structure at the international level and at the same time at the continental level, suggesting the prospects of improving strategic partnerships for achieving sustainable development goals. Further research should explore exponential random graph models (ERGMs) by considering different specific attributes (i.e., GDP, country density, country population, types of landscapes) along with a detailed analysis, targeting how the principles of these multilateral agreements are implemented in practice at national level after ratification.
