Sikina Jinnah has delivered an invaluable addition to the study of global environmental governance in both empirical and theoretical terms. She enters new empirical terrain by marrying two emerging research themes, international treaty secretariats and interlinkages between international regimes. The chief objective of her study of such interlinkages is to examine “how and when secretariats influence … power relations between states” (p. 4).
Jinnah convincingly shows that, with few exceptions, major schools of thought missed capturing the role of secretariats as bona fide actors, leaving them “still deeply in the IR analytical dark” (p. 3). In three steps, she carefully crafts an analytical framework (Chapter 3), starting with the two explanatory factors at its center, which she derives from the literatures on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and epistemic communities: low substitutability of secretariat functions on the overlap in question, and weak solidification of state preferences on this overlap.
Building on the work of Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (editors of Power in Global Governance, 2005), Jinnah further distinguishes three forms of power through which secretariats may impact interstate relations: institutionally, by shaping formal and informal institutions on a regime overlap; structurally, by shaping how actors understand and operationalize their relationships to one another; and productively, by shaping norms and ideas through knowledge systems and discursive practices. These forms of power can, in turn, be mobilized through different mechanisms that Jinnah adopts from a pioneering project led by Frank Biermann and Bernd Siebenhüner (editors of Managers of Global Change: The Influence of International Environmental Bureaucracies, 2009): knowledge brokering, negotiation facilitation, and capacity building.
Jinnah thoroughly applies this multidimensional framework, impressing the reader with a differentiated set of findings for four case studies that reveal considerable variation in secretariat influence. In Chapter 4, she scrutinizes the role of the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in managing interlinkages with a large number of other biodiversity-related agreements. The secretariat exerted institutional power through knowledge brokering and negotiation facilitation, shaping various formal and informal institutions that mediated relationships between state actors, for example, the Biodiversity Liaison Group. Jinnah also finds strong evidence for the relevance of her two major variables, substitutability and state preference solidification—explaining the powerful role of the secretariat until the late 1990s, but also its decline thereafter, when conditions became less favorable.
Chapter 5 displays a different, productive form of power wielded by the CBD secretariat when managing overlaps with climate change. Former Executive Secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf reframed biodiversity in a way that incentivized developing countries to put more emphasis on biodiversity conversation in United Nations climate negotiations. As in the first case, Jinnah corroborates the impact of her two explanatory variables, also for the gradual decrease of secretariat influence after both conditions turned out more obstructive.
Chapter 6 on the World Trade Organization secretariat’s role in trade—environment overlaps is split into two subcases, the Division on Trade and Environment (DTE) and WTO dispute settlement. Developing countries might rely on the DTE for negotiation support and information, but unlike in the previous case studies, Jinnah finds that other organizations easily substitute the secretariat’s role here. For dispute settlement, by contrast, the secretariat faced much lower competition and could exercise some moderate degree of productive and institutional power, for example, by shaping how settlement panels were constituted and how they make rules.
The final case study (Chapter 7) displays the weakest degree of influence or, rather, no influence at all for the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). In an intensive turf battle with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the CITES secretariat failed in its efforts to manage the regime overlap on commercially exploited aquatic species. States eventually settled for the FAO’s less precautionary approach to species listings. It was, thus, the easy substitutability of the CITES secretariat’s functions by a rival secretariat that prevented any notable influence.
In her conclusions (Chapter 8), Jinnah does not shy away from a critical review of her work’s analytical reach, stressing the need for testing further explanatory variables and for analyzing other forms of overlap management like treaty clustering or state-driven efforts. In her final outlook, she raises a normative flag and wonders whether bureaucrats “should be substantively participating in political decision-making processes at all” (p. 192). She reminds us that international organizations face limits of legitimacy, accountability, and transparency and ultimately “may perpetuate the interests of powerful countries within ostensibly legitimate processes” (p. 193).
While the author provides us with an extraordinary analytical framework, some of her theoretical choices call for further justification, positioning, or consistency. This starts with her two key variables that she derives from theories on epistemic communities and NGOs. There are differences between these actors and secretariats that may set limits to the transferability, for example, with respect to the (non)governmental character, degrees of specialization, legitimacy, and operation across scales. While Chapter 3 introduces both variables and their measurement in detail (pp. 56–65), these differences and their implications are not problematized.
In the same vein, Jinnah could have made clearer where her framework stands theoretically. Both functional substitutability and state preferences are rationalist variables. This raises the question why constructivist factors are left out at this level of the explanatory framework but brought in at other levels, namely, forms of power (productive) and mechanisms of influence (at least part of knowledge brokering and negotiation facilitation). Post-Treaty Politics could have included—either deductively at the beginning or inductively in the conclusions—a discussion concerning how the three main components of the analytical framework (explanatory factors, forms of power, mechanisms of influence) hang together, where limits of consistency and compatibility arise, and whether recurring patterns between them can be expected or observed.
A related point is raised by Oran R. Young in his foreword. With its two key variables, the analysis focuses on attributes of the setting in which a secretariat operates rather than on qualities of that secretariat itself. This unitary conception of secretariats is surprising, since organizational culture and transparency matter at other steps of Jinnah’s analysis, when selecting adequate methods (interviews, document analysis, or participant observation), depending on how accessible or informative secretariat staff and reports turn out.
Moreover, the problem structure or nature of the overlap does not play a key role in the explanatory framework. This is striking, first, because the aforementioned project by a team around Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) found clear evidence that qualities of the issue area shape the influence of a secretariat. Second, unlike the framework’s actual key variables, problem structure has turned out instrumental for Jinnah’s selection of cases: They reflect different degrees of issue overlaps and potential institutional tensions—within an environmental field (biodiversity), between two environmental issues (biodiversity and climate), and between environmental and nonenvironmental fields (biodiversity and fisheries; environment and trade). What is more, the nature of the overlap may impact at least one of the key variables. As the author shows for the CITES-FAO case, substitutability of a secretariat may well be a function of the existence and behavior of a rival secretariat.
To be fair, these theoretical considerations are mostly suggestions for follow-up studies. Jinnah has found the right balance between a demanding, but not inflated, framework and its diligent application. She is well aware of the analytical limits and takes into account potential rival factors through her process-tracing methodology. Altogether, with a highly reflected and manageable research design, her remarkable book moves secretariat influence out of the analytical dark to a considerable degree. It stands as an inspiration for much-needed further studies on this institutional phenomenon within and beyond global environmental governance.
