Learning from Others’ Mistakes: Experience Mobilization across MEA Secretariats

• In Event: Bureaucracy and Staff of International Organizations

Abstract

Secretariats play a crucial role in the implementation of the international agreements for which they are responsible. This is especially true for multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), where the skills and leadership of a secretariat can significantly facilitate or hinder negotiations among state parties. Existing work has explored the role of certain secretariats in the implementation of the MEAs with which they are associated. However, research on the interactions between distinct MEA secretariats remains limited, despite evidence that they are in regular contact, keep up with parallel developments in other treaties and use this knowledge to guide certain of their own decisions. This paper thus asks how MEA secretariats learn from one another’s experiences. I argue that secretariats operating within the MEA ecosystem develop consensual knowledge about the causes and effects of common implementation issues that they encounter. This consensual knowledge emerges within each secretariat through a process of organizational learning: when faced with a problem, a secretariat observes its counterparts’ practices as part of its search for solutions and information; the information is then interpreted and yields an internal debate regarding its integration into the secretariat’s knowledge base; finally, knowledge can be institutionalized within the secretariat’s rules and organizational memory. To test this proposition, I analyze the content of several thousand working and information documents issued by the secretariats of 30 major MEAs following each treaty’s entry into force. I build a dataset of references made by each secretariat to other MEAs, coding the presence of a reference, the MEA it refers to, as well as the content of the reference. Using network analysis, I measure the number of references between each dyad; their directionality; as well as the centrality of each treaty within the network. I find that secretariats are more likely to draw from MEAs with similar problem structures and implementation dynamics; that they are more likely to learn from others’ failures than from their successes; and that certain MEAs are unexpectedly central to the network despite lower political salience. While previous work has documented cross-references to other MEAs in the text of treaties themselves, no similar empirical analysis has yet been conducted for the implementation phase. In addition, secretariats have often been considered in terms of their agency or autonomy vis-à-vis their member states, but theorizations of their interactions with one another have rarely been seen. I aim to fill this gap through the application of the organizational learning framework to secretariats as interconnected actors within a network. Finally, I argue that considering MEAs as an ecosystem in which synergies and secretariat-to-secretariat interactions can develop helps provide insight into the conditions under which implementation challenges can be overcome, ultimately improving our understanding of treaties’ effectiveness as well.

Author

• Mathilde Gauquelin, Laval University