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While most of today’s global challenges are deeply interconnected, international organizations often operate in silos. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015, have been advanced as a new agenda to break up these silos and to better integrate environmental, social and economic policies. Yet little is known about whether the SDGs had any effects in advancing policy integration. To investigate this, we conducted a quantitative content analysis on the website texts of 159 international organizations. Our study addresses two questions: (1) whether international organizations increasingly engage with the SDGs in their work; and (2) whether this engagement increased their attention for policy integration. Our results show that the SDGs are indeed increasingly used by most international organizations. However, this has not affected policy integration. We conclude with some possible explanations for this lack of effect and propose several research avenues.

During the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations consulted worldwide nearly ten million people for their views. Such proliferating megaconsultations are often uncritically accepted as a remedy for an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental institutions. We argue, however, that the potential of civil society consultations to democratize global governance is constrained by the limited legitimacy of these consultations in the first place. Global consultations regularly fail to include civil society actors from developing countries, or show other sociodemographic biases. Also, they often fail to strengthen accountability between citizens, international organizations and governments. In this article, we investigate the causes of this phenomenon by exploring the relationship between the design of consultations and their democratic legitimacy. The basis for our argument is an in-depth empirical study of three consultations carried out during the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals. We find that design is an important variable to explain the overall legitimacy of consultations. Yet its exact role is sometimes unexpected. Extensive material resources and open access conditions do not systematically enhance the legitimacy of the studied consultations. Instead, developing clear objectives, allocating sufficient time to participants, and formally binding the consultation to the negotiations hold considerably more promise.

International environmental institutions are key for addressing global environmental problems, such as overfishing, climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, as the overexploitation of natural resources as well as unsustainable practices of governance, settlement, and economic activities have been established over long periods of time, international environmental institutions are challenged to provide global environmental protection. These difficulties are amplified by the often-lacking cooperation and coordination of international environmental institutions in a fragmented global governance structure. Thus, integration is an indispensable part for achieving global environmental protection. Although both academics and practitioners are increasingly calling for more global environmental protection, there is no simple one-size-fits-all solution available that could ensure such an endeavor. What is needed is a thorough understanding of individual institutional specifications, interactions and interconnections and even systemic dynamics that emerge from institutional linkages over time. Institutional change analysis allows to study these aspects in a comprehensive way and to examine integration efforts of international environmental institutions over time. Rather than taking snapshots of international environmental institutions, this dissertation looks at longitudinal developments towards global environmental protection. Therefore, to discern high expectations and policy objectives from what is really happening, this dissertation addresses the following research question: How do international environmental institutions change and integrate in global governance? This dissertation draws a distinction between how international environmental institutions drive a process of integration in a larger institutional context which is external to them and how they integrate rules which are internal to them. The answer to the question emerged from four studies. Study 1 synoptically reviewed institutional change and integration in the global food governance system. It showed that actors are important for altering global governance processes. Especially, the role of private actors and governments needs to be taken into consideration for understanding the rules of the game. Study 2 provided findings that policy integration is a key institutional change process for global governance. Yet, most international environmental institutions do not integrate their institutional activities but remain in silos, which is a barrier to the achievement of global environmental protection. Study 3 shows in detail that an international environmental institution has the potential to be a driver of global environmental protection through policy integration while being challenged by multiple barriers at the same time. Thus, for international environmental institutions to alter global governance processes, they must actively take efforts in enabling and fostering policy integration as well as international cooperation and collaboration. Study 4 provided support for the idea that institutional change is a gradual transformational process in which there can be multiple variations of rule dynamics over time. Study 4 showed that bridging historical institutionalism and organizational science can bring new insights into institutional change at the sub-institutional level, i.e., internal developments of an organization. This dissertation postulates that international environmental institutions are central for altering global governance processes. Yet, the studies have shown that international environmental institutions are struggling at various fronts when it comes to a successful integration of policies, but also cooperation and coordination efforts.

During the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations consulted worldwide nearly 10 million people for their views. Such proliferating megaconsultations are often uncritically accepted as a remedy for an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental policymaking. The research argues, however, that civil society consultations have fallen short of democratizing global governance for mainly three reasons. First, global civil society consultations have limited legitimacy. Whether they are conducted online or within global negotiating hubs, these consultations regularly fail to include actors from developing countries or beyond institutionalized civil society networks. Second, global civil society consultations have limited influence on intergovernmental policymaking and eventually fail to increase the responsiveness of global norms and institutions to collective preferences. The research reveals a democracy—influence paradox, whereby civil society is less likely to influence within formally-commissioned, far-reaching and inclusive consultations than within informal and elitist participatory spaces. Third, despite the proliferation of megaconsultations, discursive diversity in global policymaking remains low, with mainstream discourses being over-represented compared to transformative ones. Participatory exclusiveness eventually produces discursive exclusiveness, thus indicating the limits of discursive representation for global democratization. Despite their limitations, the research concludes that global consultations still provide an important impetus to democratization by building civil society actors' democratic skills. It advances a set of recommendations to guide the future action of practitioners in strengthening much needed global democratic safeguards, now that recent developments in world politics suggest it is fear, rather than cooperation, that dictates political behaviors in the global system.