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, joined the Geneva Graduate Institute’s faculty in September 2023. She was previously a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, USA, and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, UK. She recently co-authored Why International Organizations Hate Politics: Depoliticizing the World (2021) and co-edited International Organizations and Research Methods: An Introduction (2023). Her current research focuses on international organisations, multilateral practices, global environmental governance and issues of temporality and (de)politicisation.

Discussant

Astrid Skjold, Research Assisstant, Geneva Graduate Institute

Moderator

James Hollway, Co-Director for the Global Governance Centre