School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2020
Abstract
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 network analysis, we devised and tested a survey to quantify secretariat influence within an international environmental regime. We applied the survey tool to two transboundary fisheries governance networks in North America and here focus on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) as our primary case study. The results demonstrate a high ability of treaty secretariat to influence the management decisions of federal and state/provincial agencies. Primary interview data collected with the GLFC secretariat staff helps explain this finding. This study advances the reconceptualization of secretariat influence via relational metrics, and offers a way to estimate secretariat influence despite their typically veiled modes of operation.
Recommended Citation
Song, A. M., Temby, O., Kim, D., & Hickey, G. M. (2020). Assessing the influence of international environmental treaty secretariats using a relational network approach. Earth System Governance, 5, 100076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2020.100076
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Earth System Governance
DOI
10.1016/j.esg.2020.100076