The scholarship presented in this book is in line with an ongoing trend of turning to international negotiations as sites of study in global environmental politics (O'Neil and Haas 2019). In this work, I rely on mixed qualitative methods, including participant observation, elite interviews and document analysis.

As a participant observer, I have attended the meetings of expert institutions as well as of the policymaking forums to which they provide advice (the latter are most often called “Conference of the Parties” or “COP”). I carried out fieldwork between 2002 and 2015, and the bulk of it while working as a writer and editor on a team producing the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB). The Bulletin describes itself as “a neutral, authoritative and up-to-the-minute record of ongoing multilateral negotiations on environment and sustainable development.” 1 In practice, the Bulletin, hosted under the auspices of a nonprofit organization based in Canada, contracts with Secretariats to provide reports of the meeting and then fields a team of consultant writers to observe and record the events. ENB team members are often graduate students, though some are also freelance consultants, and they follow a structured reporting protocol that yields a succinct summary of a day's or a week's proceedings. In some ways, the work unfolding within ENB teams is akin to that carried out through collaborative event ethnography (Corson et al. 2014; Duffy 2014). My participant observation through this affiliation has afforded me extensive access to formal and informal negotiation sessions, to the text as it is negotiated and to negotiators and administrators themselves.

I supplemented this participant observation with a series of interviews of key participants drawn from stakeholder groups in the meetings I observed. These participants included: experts serving on the institutions providing the advice, delegates negotiating the terms of the institution, delegates receiving the advice and administrators overseeing the organization of these expert institutions. I further bolstered my in-person research and cross-checked my findings through document analysis. Rather than drawing only on published, final-version documentation of proceedings, I tracked the evolution of negotiated text through the more ephemeral paperwork that circulates in the halls of the meeting.