Collaborative Research: Effective Design of Institutions and Data Sharing Platforms in International Environmental Agreements

This project assesses information sharing rules and practices in four International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) that govern global biodiversity conservation and sustainable use. Information sharing is critical to building trust and cooperative action among diverse actors and IEA member states in order to reach jointly agreed-upon global conservation objectives.

In practice, however, IEA member countries follow a range of strategies for the selective sharing of information in order to promote different economic, social, or political objectives. At the same time, national funding agencies, non-governmental conservation organizations, and businesses are investing heavily in emerging technologies for monitoring and sharing data about global biodiversity conditions.

Nonetheless, little is known about the current design and effectiveness of IEA information sharing platforms, or how IEA parties interact with global scientific data infrastructures in the context of meeting treaty obligations. In response, the project will advance knowledge of the complex landscape of global information sharing in conservation by examining the formal IEA information sharing rules and how they are mediated and operationalized through digital infrastructures by a variety of actors, including IEA Secretariats, government representatives, researchers, and conservation organizations.

It will also map the data and decision-making linkages and gaps within and across the IEA information sharing platforms. Project findings will provide a systematic and holistic understanding of information sharing’s role in environmental governance and inform improvement and innovation in biodiversity resource management.

The project uses a mixed-method approach to analyze the degree to which conservation-related data are exchanged on IEA platforms, how the level of exchange differs within and across IEA regimes, and how information sharing has been codified formally and in practice. This is accomplished by (i) using a standardized syntax called the Institutional Grammar to parse formal rules governing information sharing practices into core components and identify their rule type configurations by function (e.g., monitoring); (ii) examining the IEA platforms’ technical architectures and contents through a combination of IT staff interviews, data analytics, and database structure review; and (iii) interviewing key international and national decisionmakers to gain insights on information sharing perceptions and practices.

The qualitative and quantitative data gained in steps (i) to (iii) will inform a Structural Equation Model designed to identify factors salient to the variation in actors’ information sharing propensities. IEA platforms offer a major opportunity to investigate long-standing assumptions about the importance of information sharing to effective resource governance.

This project taps into that potential to investigate how the social and technical designs of IEA data infrastructures influence trust and transparency. Project results will include descriptive analyses of similarities and differences in the configuration of formal IEA information sharing rules, insights into IEA platform design, interconnectivity, and management of shared information, and the propensity of actors to engage with the rules and platform infrastructure and effectively share information.

These results are also significant for recognizing and addressing equity and justice issues, e.g. for marginalized peoples and lower income nations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.