This chapter guides the researcher through key elements of developing a research methodology for conducting research on and at global environmental negotiations and agreement-making sites. It addresses four important components: 1) Methodological: how to develop a research project; 2) Ethical: how to reflect on and comply with ethical standards; 3) Legal: how to protect, manage and store data and 4) Organizational: how to prepare research on-site. We address key cross-cutting issues relevant to all chapters of the book and the central question of how to decide whether you need to be on-site to answer your research question and advance the state of the art on global environmental agreement-making. The chapter includes three main takeaways: First, the ethical, legal, and organizational aspects of this kind of research are as important as the conceptual and methodological work that prepares scholars for data collection and participant observation on-site. Second, access, funding, and data protection need to be addressed early in the research process and should be reflected at different stages of the research process. Third, regardless of the research puzzle and methodology, conducting research on and at negotiations will always imply a high degree of reflexivity and preparedness.

This chapter brings central elements of the book to the fore, reflects the need for critical thinking, and problematizes the future of agreement-making and the study thereof. In doing so, it addresses critical questions that run through all chapters of the book: Why does it matter to “be there”? How do I navigate closeness and emotions? Is my data ever complete? What will “being there” mean in the future? Global environmental agreement-making is in constant flux, adapting to changing institutional circumstances, power relations, and new emerging environmental problems. Although the multilateral setting with its “old-fashioned” diplomatic practices and formalities creates the impression of stability, routine, and immutability, there is change and the possibility to do global environmental relations differently. We understand critical scholarship to have a vital role in illuminating enduring power relations and revealing potential openings for change and transformation to ensure agreement-making enables better collective stewardship of the Earth. This aspiration nourished the objective of this book to problematize how and why we conduct research at and on global environmental negotiations and to evaluate and expand the concepts and methods available to further this study. The chapter closes with a reflection on future research questions and themes.

This chapter provides practical guidance on conducting fieldwork at international environmental conferences by drawing on the experiences of four advanced or recently completed PhD research projects: two on the climate change negotiations and two on biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. The four cases focus on different actors and aspects of the negotiations and represent different degrees of immersion that the researchers had in the process. After a brief presentation of each of the projects, their commonalities and differences are analyzed in terms of four main aspects: access and preparation, data gathering, data analysis, and positionality. Through these case studies, the chapter explores the application of theories and methods from across the book and a range of challenges and opportunities faced during different stages of the research. The chapter also identifies adjustments to digital ethnography that were necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic and concludes with recommendations for early career researchers intending to study global environmental agreement-making as part of their PhD research.

In this chapter we explore how to identify and select concepts from the work of political theorists, using Pierre Boudieu, Michele Foucault, and Jacques Lacan as examples. Starting with Foucault’s notion of discourse, we explore how scholars of environmental politics have adapted this term to develop an analytical framework that enables them to address their research puzzle and sites of study. We then use our study of IPCC and IPBES to recount how the scholarship of Bourdieu and Foucault has informed our individual study and how adopting key concepts from these theorists has enabled us to understand and explain the power asymmetries observed during intergovernmental meetings. However, there may come a point when the concepts adopted and applied, and the analytical approach developed from these, no longer provide adequate explanations for the observations made, and this may signal the need for combining different approaches or developing new concepts, as explored through the weighted concept. At the same time, the chapter reflects on why as a research community we are attracted to particular theorists – often dead, white, French, men – and the limitations this choice has the potential to impose and reproduce on present observation and analysis of global environmental politics.

This chapter is a practical guide for navigating international environmental conferences, focusing on what there is to these events beyond the negotiations. It sensitizes readers to the existence and specificities of conference spaces and practices such as side events, the corridors, and civil society protests, first touching upon spaces within conference venues before zooming out to consider how conferences manifest outside and beyond their dedicated venue. Building on this scene-setting, the chapter outlines the distinction between using the various conference spaces as sites for data collection and treating them as research objects in their own right. It especially underscores the need for comparative research across processes, notably by providing novel insights on the side-event phenomenon. The chapter makes explicit much of the implicit knowledge that enables seasoned participants to smoothly navigate these events and aims to stimulate scholarship that advances our understanding of the multifaceted nature of these conferences and their constitutive parts.

In this chapter, I describe how my research with Indigenous Peoples has informed my understanding and conceptualization of what ethical research with Indigenous negotiators, representatives, and researchers at environmental negotiations based on the principle of relationality entails. Following Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, I reflect on how I build relationality with Indigenous groups taking their politics at the negotiations in dialogue with their politics at the territory as part of a diplomatic effort (Indigenous diplomacies) of reciprocity between the world of global environmental negotiations, which is a world of multilateralism, and the worlds of Indigenous Peoples, which is a pluriverse of life projects. For doing this, methodologically, I look at Indigenous participation at negotiations, and in a given meeting, in conversation with how they define global environmental negotiations as both a political place and a political event that is part of a continuous political process.

The introduction explores why there is so much scholarly interest in global environmental negotiations and how the conceptualization and study of these has changed over time. It unpacks how to study global environmental negotiations and related sites as agreement-making defined as the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made, and the new sets and arrangements of actors, sites, and processes that are created by any specific agreement, which have the potential to reinforce or reorient the global political order. This approach is offered as a way to organize, spatialize, situate, and connect diverse forms of scholarship into, around, and related to negotiation sites and their products. The introduction provides an overview of the book chapters, which provide the methodological building blocks for conducting this research. As such, the book is relevant for many other nonenvironmental issue areas where collective action is at the core, such as global health, nuclear nonproliferation, security, and trade.

This chapter explores the process of developing analytical frameworks to guide empirical research on agreement-making. An analytical framework is a set of ideas that structure analysis by specifying core concepts and relationships to be explored. In some cases, a researcher may be able to use an existing framework found in the literature. More frequently, a researcher will need to adapt an existing framework or develop a new framework to address their specific research questions. In this chapter, the authors share their own experiences of developing and adapting frameworks to analyze nonstate actors’ influence and agency in agreement-making. They argue that deciding on a framework requires deep thinking about key concepts and relationships in the context of existing literature and data access. Frameworks evolve through an iterative process over the course of the research. Working with frameworks is a creative part of the research process that can help researchers navigate the messy and overwhelming world of agreement-making. The chapter thereby situates the role of frameworks in the wider research process and provides insights into different ways to go about working with analytical frameworks.

As the configuration of global environmental governance has become more complex over the past fifty years, numerous scholars have underscored the importance of understanding the transnational networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that comprise it. Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) is a relational methodology that aims to capture the dynamics of these constantly shifting networks. CEE draws on multisited, team, and institutional ethnography to assemble teams of researchers to study major international conferences, which offer important political spaces where these networks can be observed. Drawing on more than ten years of experience with CEE, we argue that strong approaches to collaboration offer rich opportunities for analyses of global environmental governance. In CEE, researchers collaborate on all aspects of the research process, from research design to analysis to writing. The aim of this chapter is to introduce CEE, providing a history of its development, reviewing the benefits and challenges of CEE, reflecting on the theoretical insights generated through CEE in relation to understanding environmental agreement-making, and offering practical guidance for researchers interested in using the methodology. Going beyond CEE, the chapter also considers collaboration in the context of the broader scholarly landscape.

Agreement-making has always been, and continues to be, shaped by gradual change and unforeseen situations on site, to which both participants and researchers must adapt. This chapter provides guidance on how to cope with the unexpected, discusses specific situations that may occur on site, and shows how to make use of digital and hybrid sites in methodological and conceptual terms. First, it presents a set of typical unforeseen situations that may arise at any point during the research process, especially during fieldwork, and identifies strategies for adapting to these kinds of unanticipated events. Second, it illustrates how the methodology of an entire research project can be modified by using the example of how the ERC research project MARIPOLDATA responded to the indefinite postponement of BBNJ IGCs in 2020. Third, it points to the advantages and disadvantages of digital ethnography, and, fourth, discusses the future role of digital and hybrid meetings for the study of global environmental agreement-making.

What does it mean to engage ethnography in the study of global environmental politics, particularly at sites of global agreement-making? This chapter explores how different forms of ethnography, including traditional field-based, digital, visual, and spatial approaches, can uncover and interrogate the hidden dynamics that shape the production of global environmental governance. The chapter introduces readers to how ethnographic approaches to these sites have inspired new ways of asking questions about global environmental politics. It considers the opportunities and challenges of adopting transdisciplinary and feminist approaches to ethnography, both in terms of practical concerns in the field and broader disciplinary concerns. It further provides a toolkit for designing ethnographic research with significant attention to the ethical dimensions of ethnography, from project conception through to results communication and data stewardship across the life of the project.

Global environmental meetings provide a locale for understanding how multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) become words on paper that shape international practices and norms. These meetings are central sites of global environmental agreement-making because they provide diverse actors with a negotiation space and process for the development of treaty text. This chapter provides practical guidance to those who attend, observe, and collect data at MEA negotiation sites. It will help researchers design and implement their studies, and situate their academic work into the negotiation process. Scholars, students, and observers at all stages of their careers will find this chapter useful when preparing to attend a MEA supreme body meeting, navigating on-site, and working to understand and analyze their observations afterward. It can also help when choosing whether to attend in person or not, highlighting the digital resources now available that make that decision even easier. In sum, by unpacking the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made and the new arrangements these create, this chapter helps the reader find the appropriate site for their research and navigate the events more confidently.

This chapter explains how we might use Social Network Analysis (SNA) in studying agreement-making in global environmental governance. It explains a number of the key methodological processes involved in doing SNA, regarding different ways to go about data collection and specific analytical techniques that can be used within SNA that are of particular interest within studies of global environmental governance, such as network structure or the brokerage position of particular individuals or organizations. It also shows how SNA has used by scholars in the field, notably to study patterns of connection within global governance complexes, forms of authority of specific groups of individuals within environmental governance, for example deriving from positions within scientific or professional networks. Finally it makes a number of suggestions about how to thinking about integrating SNA into broader mixed-method studies of agreement-making, including using it as background research prior to visiting negotiating meetings, to identify patterns to be explored in other ways at those sites, as well as to use the negotiating sites themselves to generate accounts of social networks in action in environmental governance.