Major crises shake political institutions and the ways they prioritize some issues over others. At the international level, they challenge actors in charge of promoting long-term concerns no longer perceived as priorities in comparison with crisis-related immediate needs. However, even if the specific issues they are mandated to manage and solve are (momentarily) cast away, international organizations (IOs) keep on trying to push their thematic agenda, hence justifying their very existence in the multilateral system.
Building on the findings of a research project investigating how UN actors attempted to keep the environment on the international agenda during the COVID-19 pandemic, this talk will delve into the practices and strategies IOs may employ to attract and maintain political attention despite competing priorities and overlapping crises. To capture these attempts, Lucile Maertens and her team propose the concept of agenda-keeping, expanding conceptual thinking beyond agenda-setting and jointly addressing competition between global problems and functional divisions between IOs.
Speaker
Lucile Maertens is Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute, co-director of the Global Governance Centre and scientific collaborator at the University of Lausanne. Her current research focuses on international organisations, multilateral practices, global environmental governance and issues of temporality and (de)politicisation. She is finalising a three-year SNFS research project on agenda-keeping in times of crisis investigating how UN actors maintained political attention on the environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. She recently co-authored Why International Organizations Hate Politics: Depoliticizing the World (Routledge, 2021) and La dépolitisation du monde (Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2024), and co-edited International Organizations and Research Methods: An Introduction (University of Michigan Press, 2023). She also co-leads a project that academically documents Switzerland’s first membership on the UN Security Council from 2023 to 2024 (funded by the Fondation pour l’Université de Lausanne).
Discussant
Astrid Skjold, Research Assisstant, Geneva Graduate Institute
Moderator
James Hollway, Co-Director for the Global Governance Centre
***A light lunched will be served before the event in front of room S8***