Super-Networks: Fostering Rights & Justice for Sustainable Environmental Policy-Making

This project examines the role of “super-networks”, as new forms of transnational advocacy vehicles across policy fields, in fostering interlinkages between environmental and human rights institutions – resulting in more sustainable policies. Examples for these policy approaches strongly influenced by super-networks are a human rights-based approach in climate politics or a rights of nature-based approach in biodiversity politics. These approaches lead to more sustainable policies as they take societal, international, intergenerational and interspecies justice considerations into account. Super-networks can be grasped as a network structure above different individual networks, in which transnational advocacy networks (TANs) from various policy areas interact, find a consensual advocacy strategy and a common message that they present in a unified way, manipulate existing political opportunities and establish more sophisticated tactics to enhance institutional access and influence policy-making in inter-governmental forums. The concept of the super-network is something I have developed and introduced to International Politics in my previous research on the role of transnational advocacy networks in fostering interactions between the climate change and human rights regimes by including rights and sustainability principles in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (Schapper 2020, 2021). This fellowship would provide me with the opportunity to further develop and establish my research on the concept of super-networks by investigating their transnational advocacy activities in three different, yet interrelated, forums: (1) COP 26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2021 in Glasgow (Scotland), where a super-network will advocate for rights-based social and environmental safeguards to regulate global carbon markets under the Paris Agreement (Article 6 negotiations), (2) COP 15 of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) in October 2021 in Kunming (China), where a super-network will push for advancing rights of nature through the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and (3) Human Rights Council (HRC 48) Session in September 2021 in Geneva, where a super-network will promote the adoption of a new international human right to a healthy environment. The main objectives of this project are (a) to learn more about the initiation, establishment, activities, multi-level collaboration (between grassroots/community/local/national/global actors) and potential conflicts within super-networks in these three forums (academic objective), (b) to explore links between super-networks active in the climate, biodiversity and human rights regime (academic objective) and (c) to better understand how super-networks focusing on rights-based approaches can function as a new transnational vehicle to transport local societal concerns in relation to climate change, biodiversity degradation and environmental challenges to the inter-governmental negotiation table and to effectively change policy decisions making them more sustainable (policy impact objective).
To achieve these objectives, the project will revert to a mixed-methods research design proceeding in the following methodological steps: a content analysis of primary sources produced (and used) by the super-networks in these three negotiations forums, including strategy papers, briefing documents, email summaries and twitter feeds (academic objective a), a social network analysis to reconstruct complex interaction and inter-network dynamics, linkages between actors and the implications these linkages bear (academic objective b), participatory observations at the strategic meetings of the respective super-networks at (or shortly after) these three international conferences and expert interviews with initiators, main political entrepreneurs and network representatives from different policy fields following the inter-governmental negotiations (academic objectives a & b, policy impact objective c).