New Alliances in Global Sustainability Governance: Intergovernmental Treaty Secretariats and Sub- and Non-State Actors

The past few years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars in the role and function of international bureaucracies. Some skeptics continue to doubt that the bureaucracies of international organizations and regimes have any significant impact beyond that of technical assistance and services to national governments. Yet, numerous authors contend that these actors indeed have an autonomous influence in global policy-making. Despite the progress in the study of international bureaucracies, their interplay with sub-national governments, civil society organizations, and private companies has only lately received wider scholarly attention. For that reason, this article explores the institutional interactions between three secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements and sub- and non-state actors in the area of global sustainability governance. Building upon a resource-exchange perspective, the article particularly investigates how the climate, biodiversity, and desertification secretariats interact with different types of non-nation-state actors to induce national governments to adopt a more ambitious stance on combating the respective collective action problems.