Behind the Scenes

Abstract

This chapter argues that SNA provides a promising method for assessing the political influence of IPAs. While there is little doubt that international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on international policy outputs, scholars struggle with the problem of how to measure this influence. Established methods for assessing political influence are of limited use when focusing on IPAs. The “hidden” character of potential IPA influence is strongest for international treaty secretariats. Treaty secretariats are issue-specific administrations that focus on single-policy problems rather than entire policy areas. The changing role of international environmental treaty secretariats is also reflected in new concepts of IPAs as orchestrators or as attention-seeking bureaucracies. Data were collected between September 2015 and March 2016, approaching a wide variety of state and non-state actors operating at different levels of the global environmental policy domain via a large-N survey of organizations in the field of global climate governance.