Overlap Management in the World Trade Organization: Secretariat Influence on Trade-Environment Politics

Sikina Jinnah
Additional contact information
Sikina Jinnah: Sikina Jinnah is Assistant Professor of International Relations at American University. She received her PhD from U.C. Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and did her postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. She has published articles in Science Magazine, Environmental Research Letters, and the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review.

Global Environmental Politics, 2010, vol. 10, issue 2, 54-79

Abstract: This article builds on recent scholarship that explores the nature of secretariat influence in global governance. By combining data from interviews with WTO delegates and secretariat staff with document analysis, this study examines how the WTO secretariat is shaping trade-environment politics by using its bureaucratic authority to influence overlap management in the WTO. This study argues that secretariat influence is present, but varies in form across cases. It shows up in the forms noted by previous scholars in their examinations of UNEP secretariats (i.e. negotiation-facilitation, capacity building, and knowledge-brokering), but also in previously un-discussed forms of influence such as marketing convention norms, and litigation facilitation. It further argues that secretariat influence matters in that the WTO secretariat plays an important role in shaping the way trade-environment issues evolve within the WTO, shaping its own identity as a hybrid administrative-judicial organ, as well as in enhancing WTO legitimacy with the broader public. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/glep.2010.10.2.54 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:10:y:2010:i:2:p:54-79

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().