Introduction: Studying the role and influence of international environmental bureaucracies

Abstract

The chapter reviews the most recent advances in the scholarly literature on international environmental bureaucracies and relates it to the long and fruitful research agenda on International Public Administrations (IPAs). In the first section, IPAs are defined and distinguished from the wider international organizations or treaty systems that they are an integral part of. The next section addresses the question of whether and how IPAs should be expected to matter in global environmental governance. It then presents selected empirical studies that find IPAs to have had an autonomous, discernible influence on international policy processes and outputs. The last section identifies the most relevant determinants and causal mechanisms of IPA influence and shows how the chapters in the book contribute to this continuously evolving research agenda.