Blog of Pascale Muylaert, SI Representative to the UN in Geneva.

These days, international Geneva practitioners and environmental defenders in general face deep uncertainty, overlapping crises, and competition between major problems. Despite these challenges, their activities have to remain politically relevant to ensure steady progress in the fight against the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

Recognising this, the Global Governance Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute embarked on a three-year research project, “First Things First!”, to investigate how international organisations navigate these challenges. In November 2024, the Geneva Environment Network hosted a discussion on the project’s preliminary findings, exploring how the concept of ‘agenda-keeping’ could help organisations maximise their relevance in a constantly evolving, crisis-driven environment.

The issue: Prioritisation in Times of Crisis

Major crises disrupt political institutions and the ways they often prioritize some issues over others. At the international level, this presents a significant challenge: long-term issues risk being deprioritised as they are no longer perceived as urgent. Nevertheless, international organisations (IOs) persist in their efforts to push their thematic agendas, ensuring their continued relevance and role within the multilateral system.

Agenda-keeping as part of the solution

Professor Lucile Maertens, Co-Director of the Global Governance Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, conducted research into how UN actors worked to keep environmental issues on the international agenda during the pandemic. Through her research, she identified key practices and strategies that international organisations (IOs) can use to attract and maintain political attention, even when faced with competing priorities and overlapping crises.

From these findings, Professor Maertens introduced the concept of ‘agenda-keeping,’ which expands on traditional ideas of agenda-setting. Agenda-keeping aims to address the competition between global challenges while also tackling the functional divisions that often exist between IOs. This concept provides a framework for understanding how organisations can navigate the complex dynamics of global governance to remain relevant and impactful.

Insights from the Panel

The webinar panel, chaired by Arnold Kreilhuber, Director of the EU Office at UNEP, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including:

• H.E. Amb. Julien Thöni, Deputy Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the UN Office and other international organisations in Geneva
• Agi Veres, Director, UN Development Programme Geneva
• David Ogden, Deputy Executive Secretary, Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions
• Dina Ionesco, Senior International Technical Expert, Asylum and Migration, UN High Commissioner for Refugees
• Sebastien Duyck, Senior Attorney and Campaign Manager, Human Rights & Climate, Climate & Energy Programme, Centre for International Environmental Law

The panellists unanimously agreed that the findings reflected ‘the way they work’ and highlighted the importance of this research in improving understanding of how the United Nations operates. Specifically, the research sheds light on its internal dynamics and raises important questions about the division of work between the emergency response sector and the sustainability policy field.

Each panellist contributed their own examples and reflected on lessons learned from their work, further emphasising the relevance and practical applications of the agenda-keeping framework.

Agenda-Keeping Strategies: A Framework for Action

To maintain relevance amidst crises, international organisations (IOs) can adopt four key strategies as part of the agenda-keeping framework:

1. Reframing Issues: Connect long-term concerns with immediate crises by highlighting overlaps and proposing integrated solutions (e.g., UNEP linking pandemics and environmental health).
2. Positioning: Emphasise an issue’s unique importance or show how solving one issue can address others (e.g., UNEP’s “Making Peace with Nature” statement).
3. Space-Securing: Maintain or create forums for discussion and displace action to more favourable arenas (e.g., UNEP’s climate-security collaborations).
4. Time-Ordering: Prioritise immediate action, sustain urgency, and leverage institutional memory (e.g., advancing green recovery during pandemic delays).

This framework enables organisations to stay effective in advancing their priorities while navigating overlapping crises and competing global issues.

So what could this mean for Soroptimist International ?

The push back on the rights of Women & Girls, together with the ongoing crisis situations of Conflict and Climate change, is challenging how & when we are able to raise our voice.

Clearly, we are already using some of these strategies. The framework could offer a way of reviewing what we are doing, and where there are gaps or opportunities.