Side Events Beyond Negotiations: Impacts on National and Subnational Governance in the Plastics Regime

Multilateral environmental agreements and their formal negotiations have gained a lot of attention since the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference. However, their side events, a prominent form of organised informal interactions, have remained in the shadows, despite their potential to benefit the negotiations and their participants. While existing studies highlighted their potential impact beyond the boundaries of the negotiations, research is still lacking. Examining how side events influence lower governance levels (i.e. national and sub-national) may improve our understanding of how side events’ functions communicate with these levels of governance, and which factors make them more or less impactful. This study addresses this gap by focusing on the side events of the intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC) towards a global plastics treaty. To do so, we distributed a survey to INC participants to capture their impressions of the benefits and impacts of side events on themselves, their workplaces and beyond (n=147). To deepen insights into how specific impacts emerge, we supplemented the survey with follow-up semi-structured interviews with INC participants (n=20). Survey responses were analysed using descriptive statistics, while open-ended survey questions and interviews were coded in Atlas.ti. Preliminary findings show that participants learn from side events and apply their learnings in different ways, at times generating impact on their ways of working, within their organisations, and in some cases more broadly in society. The survey also reveals discrepancies in how participants perceive and receive side events, and identifies a function not previously presented in the literature on side events, namely ‘perspective confirmation’. Interviews provide further insight into factors (e.g. timing or format of side events) that affect if and how certain functions come about, as well as how these functions manifest and produce impacts beyond the boundaries of the negotiations.