CONNECT: Connections and Levels of Influence of Treaty Secretariats in International Environmental and Disability Policy over Time

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CONNECT seeks to systematically analyze the influence of international treaty secretariats over time. Using a mixed methods research design, the project aims to investigate two research questions:How do international treaty secretariats exert influence on the processes, discourses and outcomes of multilateral negotiations over time and across issue areas? To what extent does the secretariats' social embeddedness in issue-specific information flows explain this influence?Despite the increasing visibility of international treaty secretariats and against a growing body of research on their role in global politics (Bauer, 2006; Biermann & Siebenhüner, 2009; Busch, 2014; Jinnah, 2014), the sources and causal mechanisms of their influence on global policy outputs have not been systematically studied over time and across policy areas. CONNECT will contribute to this research gap by combining theories and methods in novel ways: The project will use social network theory and draw on techniques of quantitative Social Network Analysis (SNA) and qualitative Discourse Analysis (DA) in order to advance the understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying secretariats' influence in two different policy fields. Additionally, CONNECT will extend previous findings on the role of environmental treaty secretariats by including a treaty secretariat of a second policy field, namely that of disability policy. Altogether, CONNECT pursues four central objectives that are closely interlinked and address essential advances concerning the empirical, methodological and theoretical state of the art:1. to empirically reassess the influence of international treaty secretariats over time,2. to compare the influence of treaty secretariats in different areas (UNFCCC, CBD, CRPD), 3. to combine findings from quantitative SNA with qualitative insights gathered with DA in order to identify central determinants of secretariat influence, and4. to theoretically reconceptualize the relationship between the social embeddedness of international treaty secretariats and their influence on policy outputs using social network theory.The project seeks to contribute to these research aims by building upon results of our first project phase (namely our project ENVIPA) and the current state of the art.