Measuring the autonomous influence of an international bureaucracy: the Division for Sustainable Development

International bureaucracies influence global governance processes as independent agents. Biermann and Siebenhüner (Managers of global change: the influence of international environmental bureaucracies. MIT Press, Cambridge, <CitationRef CitationID="CR4">2009</CitationRef>) have developed an analytical framework to measure and explain the degree of autonomous influence of bureaucracies. We test the validity of the causal claims in the framework by applying it to the Division for Sustainable Development, the bureaucracy that services the Commission on Sustainable Development and compare the results with existing applications of the framework to the United Nations Environmental Program and the Climate Secretariat (UNFCCC). The test shows that the framework is comprehensive and captures the main elements of bureaucratic influence. The structure of the explanatory variables, however, as well as some causal claims, needs to be improved. For instance, the framework includes too many explanatory variables, and interplay between the variables is not taken into account. The article suggests five concrete measures to improve the framework by, for example, creating protocols, collapsing variables, and introduce weightings to the variables. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014