Post-Treaty Politics: Secretariat Influence in Global Environmental Governance, by Sikina Jinnah, was the winner of the 2016 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award given by the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association. It provides an analytically and empirically rich investigation of the ways in which actors in a context of institutional complexity can shape global environmental governance outcomes.Footnote ¹ In a world with countless environmental treaties, the management of the overlap between treaties is an important task. Managing the connections, gaps and redundancies between treaties features prominently on the agenda in many international discussions, and novel institutions are being designed to increase efficiency, remove conflict between treaties, and construct norms which can consolidate efforts. Post-Treaty Politics investigates the conditions under which the secretariats of international organizations – the professional and administrative staff tasked with the maintenance of treaties – are likely to influence political outcomes. It argues that secretariats have opportunities for independent action precisely because of institutional complexity. The book contributes to our understanding of institutional complexity by both demonstrating and explaining secretarial agency.

Jinnah develops an analytic framework for understanding secretarial impact, which breaks down the issue into identifying contexts in which secretariats have an opportunity to influence political outcomes and are likely to seize this opportunity (Chapter 3). On the first aspect, the book argues that secretariats are likely to have space for agency where state preferences have not fully solidified. Preference solidification is primarily about state understanding of the distribution of the costs of an environmental problem and the costs associated with an unfavourable outcome in international negotiations. In an insightful move, the study operationalizes this measure by focusing on the type of mandate that states give to secretariats. For example, in the World Trade Organization (WTO) case explored in the book, states have requested the WTO Secretariat to provide studies of overlap with environmental agreements but have restricted the scope and data to be used in these studies. In Jinnah’s framework, these limitations on interpretation imposed on a secretariat demonstrate moderate preference solidification among states. On the question of whether a secretariat is likely to seize the opportunity for influence, the book argues that this relates to the substitutability of the tasks performed by the secretariat. Simply stated, where secretariats have a monopoly of control over a certain task, this is likely to translate into political power. A monopoly of control is most likely in contexts where secretariats have de jure or de facto responsibility for overlap management, are in a unique position to filter information for decision makers, or have access to key forums that other international organizations or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) lack. This framework is interesting because it builds on both constructivist evolutionary arguments and rational choice principal/agent arguments. While the larger theoretical points essentially rely on constructivist understandings of power and ideas (Chapter 2), the eclectic framework allows a deeper focus on the mechanisms of influence by secretariats.

The terms of the analytic argument are significantly developed as the book proceeds through five different case studies. Areas explored in depth are the biodiversity regime (Chapter 4), the climate-biodiversity interface (Chapter 5), two aspects of the trade-environment linkages within the WTO (Chapter 6), and a case concerning the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)Footnote ² (Chapter 7). Key concepts such as preference solidification, substitutability, and political influence are well-developed and contextualized in each case: for example, the substitutability of secretarial functions is illustrated in the contrasting cases of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)Footnote ³ and CITES. For the CBD, its Secretariat was provided with unique powers in the framework treaty and was able to further define the issue of overlap management in the early years of post-treaty politics, which provided unique leverage to the Secretariat. In contrast, CITES saw its Secretariat mandated to seek input from other organizations like the United Nations (UN) Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which could rely on a better network of actors with greater scientific legitimacy on the issue of fisheries. In terms of influence, the CBD Secretariat achieved strong influence over political decisions while the CITES Secretariat had no significant influence in the issue of aquatic species.

A strength of the study is its ability simultaneously to develop the analytic framework while providing instructive examples which highlight the routine management of institutional overlap performed by secretariats. Rigorous document analysis from each of the organizations, interviews with participants, meeting attendance, and four months spent working in the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Economics and Trade Branch provide a deep understanding of overlap management in the cases (Appendix A). Concentrating on the regular practices of international organizations with regard to issue overlap results in some of the most focused contributions to the institutional complexity literature. For example, the ability of the WTO Secretariat to directly influence the dispute settlement process by filtering information for dispute settlement panelists provides an important insight into understanding the development of international trade-environment law more generally.

Building on its strong analytic and methodological foundation, the book concludes with two provocative questions. The first is whether secretariats should influence politics. The answer to this question is likely to depend upon whether one sees international organizations as diffusing power to new actors or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful.Footnote ⁴ Jinnah’s framework is useful in addressing this question as it shifts the focus away from state control over international bureaucracies to the construction of legitimate action by such bureaucracies. Both practical and analytic approaches to overlap management would be greatly aided by such a focus. The second concluding question relates to the future evolution of overlap management. The complexity of treaties may yield increased bureaucratic coherence at the international level (through the formation of ‘superbureaucracies’) or, in contrast, state management of treaty overlap. The book does not interrogate such architectural alternatives, but the framework of the book helps the reader to understand what these alternatives might mean in terms of the power of such actors to have an impact on politics.

While the analysis and empirical data focus on overlap management, the book proposes that its framework could be applied to non-environmental areas or to assess the role played by other non-state actors in global politics. In terms of the application beyond international environmental politics, the framework may be of limited use in issue areas with less institutional complexity and thus less of a focus on overlap management, those where overlap is handled primarily at the state level, or where norms specify the role to be played by technical experts and administrators. Similarly, the concept of substitutability may have to be stretched significantly to apply to NGOs, scientists or multinational corporations. Whether the concept can retain coherence by being stretched to include other actors is uncertain. Assumptions on the need or value of overlap management in other arenas, as well as the context-specific understanding of substitutability, will need to be addressed in any extensions of the book’s argument.

Post-Treaty Politics is a provocative and engaging book, which is relevant for a wide range of scholarship on environmental politics and law, international organizations, and global governance. The book’s focus on the environment should make it key reading for those interested in global environmental politics, and the discussion of knowledge facilitation and litigation facilitation presents important findings for those studying the development of international environmental law. These qualities also make the book relevant for scholars researching international organizations, international political sociology, or international political economy more generally. The discussion of preference solidification is not only a rich terrain for both constructivist and rational choice scholars, but also for those seeking to combine the insights from these two distinct ontologies. The value of the book as a template in building a framework with eclectic understandings cannot be overstated. Finally, for scholars interested in global governance, and particularly the construction of public/private governance and multilevel governance, the book provides many important methodological insights into the ways in which power works in complex organizational spaces. Post-Treaty Politics is a significant step forward in our understanding of the politics of institutional complexity and the ways in which international organizations can exercise political influence in such a context.