DFG Research Project
TRANSPACE: The Emergence of Global Administrative Spaces in Transnational Climate Policymaking
Project Leader: Prof. Dr. Nina Kolleck
Research Associates: Dr. Keith Goldstein (keith.goldstein@uni-potsdam.de), Bruna Duarte Rodrigues (bruna.rodrigues@uni-potsdam.de)
Student Assistants: Branka Đogo (branka.dogo@uni-potsdam.de), Amrutha Suresh (amrutha.suresh@uni-potsdam.de)
Duration: 36 months, 2023-2026
Funding Provider: German Research Foundation (DFG)
Funding Code: GZ: KO 4997/10-1
Project Description:
The aim of the project is to examine the emergence of Global Administrative Spaces in transnational climate policymaking. It builds systematically on research on international bureaucracies (Knill and Bauer 2016; Bauer et al. 2017; Ege et al. 2020), transnational administration (Ladi and Stone 2015; Moloney and Stone 2020; Stone and Moloney 2019), and Global Administrative Spaces (Kingsbury et al. 2005; Chiti and Wessel 2011), but also incorporates the broader literature on global climate governance architecture (Aldy and Stavins 2007; Biermann et al. 2009; Keohane and Victor 2011). The focus is primarily on the bureaucratic side of these governance arrangements, seeking answers to the following research questions: 1. How can we empirically observe, define, and analyze administrative structures beyond the territory of the nation-state? 2. How do global administrative spaces emerge? 3. How and to what extent do international public administrations (IPAs) exert power over transnational climate policymaking? 4. What influence do IPAs have on topic-specific political discourses within the global administrative space? Empirically, we rely on quantitative data collected through the social networks of International Public Administrations (IPAs). Additionally, we will gather further longitudinal data and analyze them using inferential social network analysis and natural language processing. Thus, we pursue a methodological triangulation to analyze the role of secretariats of international organizations in discourse coalitions on transnational climate policymaking. The proposed project builds systematically on my previous research. While in earlier projects, I examined social networks of international treaty secretariats in climate policy, this project aims to expand this research by applying new methods. We aim to analyze the emergence of administrative structures beyond nation-states (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart 2005) and contribute to further theory-building.
