Abstract
Participant observation and collaborative field note-taking are increasingly being used to study global environmental meetings. However, taking field notes in these complex and dynamic settings is challenging. This is illustrated by multilateral negotiations towards an ocean protection treaty that involved many state and nonstate actors both in-person at the United Nations Headquarters and online. We developed and used a fieldnote-taking method and tool supporting team research and systematic participant observation to track 5 years of negotiations that resulted in a marine biodiversity agreement. Our tool supports researchers to collect data systematically and collectively while allowing individual interpretations or styles of recording field notes. Hence our field note-taking practice constitutes a key methodological innovation for negotiation scholars, although with some epistemological, practical, and ethical limitations.
Keywords
Introduction
Global environmental meetings are increasingly used as field sites for research on the actors, processes, and sites of global environmental agreement-making (Hughes et al., 2021; Hughes and Vadrot, 2023; ÒNeill and Haas, 2019; Vadrot, 2020). Observing negotiation sites and dynamics by ‘being there’ (ÒNeill and Haas, 2019) offers many insights into global environmental negotiation practices and the social realities of state and nonstate interactions within the framework of multilateral diplomacy. Both state and nonstate actor activities in these settings are launched and sustained in face-to-face interactions, and, as such, are increasingly being studied through participant observation and ethnography (O’Neill and Haas, 2019). Indeed, over the past 10 years, the number of scholars using ethnographic methods in these settings has significantly increased (Campbell et al., 2014; Gray et al., 2014; Hughes and Vadrot, 2019; Langlet and Vadrot, 2023; Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2019, 2023), anticipating a debate about the methodological and ethical dimension of participant observation and collaborative research in such settings (Hughes et al., 2021; Vadrot and Hughes, 2023). Although taking field notes is a key component of participant observation, this practice has been little discussed in the literature in and beyond the field of negotiation research (Tjora, 2006; Wolfinger, 2002). As in other research areas, studies tend to be rather implicit about why and how field notes are taken and ‘what is actually written’ (Flora and Andersen, 2019, Walford, 2009).
While ‘at first glance, writing fieldnotes seems deceptively straightforward’ (‘Go to a research site, see what happens, then write it down’), there are diverging views of the rationale for field notes and what the writing process implies (Wolfinger, 2002: 86). This is apparent if we look at the broad spectrum of terms used to talk about them: ‘head notes’, ‘scratch notes’, ‘field notes’, ‘field note records’, ‘texts’, ‘journals and diaries’, ‘letters, reports, papers’ (see Sanjek, 1990) and, also, at the actual writing practices that ethnographers employ (Jackson, 1990; Walford, 2009). Walford (2009), for instance, found that ethnographers ‘had no common language to describe what they do when they are writing field notes’ and ‘what they actually do depends on context and personal preferences’ (Walford, 2009: 127). According to Junker (1960) collecting information through observation implies giving ‘a full and fair account of [an] observation in the situation “including full quotations verbatim as they occurred in interviews or other interactions” and adding personal reflections and research interpretations' (Junker, 1960: 14; Maharaj, 2016). This may prove an insurmountable task on many field sites, including the negotiation room, where human interaction unfolds at a rapid pace (Tjora, 2006).
In this article, we examine our field note-taking practice, as part of collaborative research, in the context of global environmental negotiations, showing exactly what we did and how. As in other areas of social science research (Emerson et al., 1995; see also Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970), comparatively little attention has been paid to the practical considerations of taking field notes in the setting of global environmental negotiations and diplomacy. Most of the extant research has been either taxonomic (Ottenberg, 1990; Sanjek, 1990) or philosophic (Clifford, 1990; Sanjek, 1990), but not pragmatic. Field note tutorials routinely neglect practical issues involved in note-taking, a particularly noteworthy absence in the light of ethnography's fundamentally ‘subjective underpinnings’ (Wolfinger, 2002: 223). This implicitness poses a problem, specifically in collaborative research settings and writing (Safronov et al. 2020), where researchers with different backgrounds and sometimes epistemologies work together.
For this reason, we have developed a pragmatic approach to collaborative field note-taking (Morgen, 2014). The setting was the negotiation of a international legally binding agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), which lasted almost 20 years (5 of which were dedicated to negotiating the legal text) and resulted in the adoption of the ‘BBNJ Agreement’ (Tessnow-von Wysocki and Vadrot, 2020; Vadrot, 2020). We developed a field note-taking method and tool supporting team research and systematic participant observation in this setting, introduced in this article. Our observations started in 2018, after the pre-negotiations had concluded, and included six 2-week-long intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) and a 2-day-long signatory IGC held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, as well as several online dialogues initiated to maintain interaction between states during the COVID-19 pandemic (Vadrot et al., 2021; Vadrot and Ruiz Rodríguez, 2022). In developing our approach, we drew on past experience as a solo ethnographer (Vadrot, 2014), on collaborative research practices (Hughes and Vadrot, 2019), and on the pioneering work of Campbell et al. (2014), who set the stage for Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) by large research teams during global environmental meetings (Campbell et al., 2014; Gray et al., 2023; Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2023). While drawing on the idea of CEE, our emphasis to standardise field notes made us partially depart from what may conventionally be understood as ‘ethnographic’, adopting a strongly structured field note-taking style that enabled diverse forms of analysis.
In the following we will reflect on the challenge of writing field notes on and during multilateral negotiations and discuss the problem of determining ‘what is actually written’ (Emerson et al., 2011). We will then introduce our field note-taking method and tool, which we used to support our team research and systematic participant observation to track 5 years of negotiations. Based on individual reflections of different team members, we will show how our tool allows researchers to collect data systematically and collectively while allowing individual interpretations and styles of taking field notes. Finally, we will discuss some epistemological, practical, and ethical limitations of our tool and critically reflect on the tension between ethnographic fieldwork and structured observation in our approach.
The challenge of writing field notes during negotiations
Emerson et al. (2011) have noted that there is a low degree of consensus amongst field researchers on the kinds of writing that can be termed ‘field notes’, how and when they should be written, and what their value for ethnographic research might be. While this debate has a long tradition in anthropology and other disciplines employing ethnographic methods (including human geography, sociology, and cultural studies) (Jackson, 1990; Sanjek, 1990; Walford, 2009), less attention has been paid to field note-taking by research on global environmental negotiations. An increasing number of scholars acknowledge the value of participant observation and assume that face-to-face relations that can be observed in the negotiation room do matter (Vadrot, 2020). However, what is less clear is how and when field notes should be written and their value for negotiation research and other studies using multilateral settings as field sites.
Global environmental meetings, where state actors negotiate legal texts laying the foundations for combating climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution or other environmental threats are complex events (Chasek, 2001) that are difficult to study. While research in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on the outcomes and on the interests of participating state actors, recent studies increasingly consider negotiations – such as the large-scale climate and biodiversity Conferences of the Parties (COPs) involving ten thousands of people – as field sites in their own right. Accordingly, they deal with the making of global environmental agreements, new actor constellations (e.g. Betsill and Corell, 2008; Thew et al., 2020), forms of influence (Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2019), networks (Green, 2013; Langlet and Vadrot, 2023; Langlet and Vadrot, 2024; Paterson, 2019), power relations (Allan and Hadden, 2017) and contestation (Hughes and Vadrot, 2019; Vadrot et al., 2021).
Furthermore, it has become more common to follow specific actors that have a stake in the issue, for instance by being part of a national delegation or a non-governmental organisation, or by joining activists (Vecchione-Gonçalves and Hughes, 2023). Participant observation has thus emerged as a key tool for research on negotiations. It enables researchers to collect data in a specific setting or location considered ‘the field’, which is often conceptualised in terms of ‘social worlds’ or ‘social realities’ in which observers are immersed, becoming part of them (Bourdieu, 2003, Emerson et al., 2011). Participant observation and the production of field notes are interconnected research activities: they imply systematically writing down what a researcher ‘observes and learns while participating in the daily rounds of the lives of others’ (Emerson et al., 2011). In the negotiation context, this means the process of different types of actors agreeing on language and legal text and the interactions between them.
A central difficulty encountered by participant observers of global multilateral negotiations is their size and complexity – large conference venues with many parallel meetings, side events and exhibition halls – together with a high level of security and formality. Chasek argues that they are ‘characterised by the complexities brought about by multiple issues, parties, and roles as well as the use of consensus decision-making’ (Chasek, 2001: 24). Indeed, they are orchestrated in very specific ways: state parties make statements in a specific order on specific negotiation items following diplomatic rules and procedures. The restrained behaviour of diplomats (Sharp, 2009), as well as ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ (Death, 2011), often conceal the highly political and strategic character of these meetings and make it hard for participant observers to record and understand the meaning of specific actions. The ‘multi-party, multi-issue, and multi-role’ (Chasek, 2001: 25) nature of these negotiations and the fact that ever more actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), media, business, youth, local and Indigenous communities, and academia (which, in some instances, has achieved the status of stakeholder) have developed an interest in participating, have led to changing group dynamics, longer meetings, and more complex interpersonal relations, which are difficult to observe and map (Hughes and Vadrot, 2023).
Although global environmental meetings may seem overwhelming, they do ‘provide a chance for extensive notes to be written at the time’ (Walford, 2009: 123). Many researchers sit in the negotiation venue at desks dedicated to observers or non-state actors; this provides room for their equipment and, in many cases, access to the power grid to charge their computer devices, pads and phones. Participant observation during negotiations is an intense experience, regardless of how and for what purpose field notes are taken. Negotiations will often continue into the night, and both negotiators and observers are subjected to sleep deprivation. If participant observation implies the recording of all participants’ behaviour and the context in which this behaviour takes place, including the researcher's own impressions, feelings and thoughts (Flick, 2014; Miles and Huberman, 1994), a satisfying level of completeness can hardly be achieved, especially for a solo researcher. Field researchers are thus discouraged from striving for a ‘complete’ or ‘correct’ version of the social world under study and, rather, are asked to adopt an approach whereby ‘what happened’ ‘is one account made by a particular person to a specific other at a particular time and place for particular purposes’ (Emerson et al., 2011: 115). Yet, when studying how states actually reach agreement on a new legal text, field researchers do strive for some kind of ‘completeness’ that enables the reconstruction of ‘what has happened’. Examples of this include information about which states support a specific provision and which do not, how non-state actors influence negotiations, and how conflicts are solved. This tension between partial and complete observations creates some ambiguities in field note-taking practice that need to be dealt with methodologically.
While triangulation is one research strategy that participant observers have employed to complement their field notes and to achieve higher completeness (e.g. with interviews and text analysis), another strategy has been collaboration and team research (Vadrot, 2023). This, however, poses its own challenges, as highlighted by Campbell et al. (2014): ‘At COP10 [tenth Conference of the Parties], we met daily to discuss emerging findings, review data gathering protocols, and plan our schedule. […] Written and recorded observations were also taken at formal and informal events, recording general observations and emphasizing those relevant to our thematic and theoretical interests. These observations were informed by participant observation guides that identified the types of people, metaphors, information, images, conflicts, and actions we might look for in relation to our thematic and theoretical interests’ (Campbell et al., 2014: 12).
CEE as described here can facilitate the coverage of a meeting and benefits from alliances between like-minded researchers. Furthermore, as argued by May and Pattillo-McCoy (2000), collaborative ethnography ‘can be useful for providing a richer description, highlighting perceptual inconsistencies, and recognizing the influence of ethnographers’ personal and intellectual backgrounds on the collection and recording of data’ (May and Pattillo-McCoy, 2000: 66; Creese et al., 2008). From an ethnographic perspective, environmental meetings and mega events are ‘critical historical junctures’ and ‘bundles of social relationships and power dynamics’ that can become ‘field-configuring events’ (Corson et al., 2014: 28). However, retaining the ‘ethnographic character’ of ethnography in the context of collaborative research in the specific setting of global environmental negotiations is challenging. It may conflict with the ambition to strive for a ‘complete’ or ‘correct’ version of ‘what happens’ in the negotiation room: of who speaks, on behalf of whom (what state or non-state actor), in what order, with what intention and effect. The speed and complexity of interaction dictates the speed and practice of note-taking. While shared participant observation guides, as described by Campbell et al. (2014), may allow a team to navigate those challenges collectively, they may also restrict individual interpretations and leave little time and space for reflection of one owns positionality and theoretical interests. In the following, we will illustrate our approach to taking field notes as a team during a 5-year negotiation process. Walford (2009) noted that ‘the amount of writing carried out in the field depends on the actual setting and the individual people involved’ (Walford, 2009: 123). Thus, we will first introduce our tool to illustrate how we attempted to record ‘what happens’ in a multilateral negotiation context and then exemplify how different members of our team have experienced note-taking with our tool, developing tacit knowledge and individual approaches to achieve both a team effort and their theoretical interests.
Collaborative field note-taking during BBNJ negotiations
‘To put it bluntly, fieldnotes are gnomic, shorthand reconstructions of events, observations, and conversations that took place in the field… Little wonder that fieldnotes are the secret papers of social research’ (Van Maanen, 1988: 223–224). This article discloses the ‘secret papers’ of our research project. We now present the contents of a selected set of field notes. This will illustrate the advantages and shortcomings of our method and how we dealt with the problem of implicit interpretation.
In the ERC research project MARIPOLDATA (2018–2024), 1 which investigated the negotiations of the BBNJ Agreement, the field was the room where state actors negotiated the new legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. The ‘BBNJ Agreement’ was negotiated during Intergovernmental Conferences where approximately 700 persons – representing over 100 governments and several NGOs – met over a series of 2-week sessions at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (Figure 1).
The BBNJ negotiation room at the UN Headquarters in New York (Photo by IISD/ENB | Francis Dejon).
From 2019 to 2023, a team of six early-career researchers and a Principal Investigator (PI) took field notes collaboratively using a field note-taking template (the ‘matrix’) to reconstruct ‘the events, observations and discussions’ in the negotiation room that led to the adoption of the Agreement on 19 June 2023 (Table 1). All in all, we took field notes at 10 sites: 7 Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) and 44 intersessional online sessions. Owing to COVID-19 restrictions, governments and a number of non-state actors continued the conversation online and we followed them to these emerging field sites; as illustrated by Eggeling (2022) and Schulte-Römer and Gesing (2022) for their event ethnographies, we adjusted our methodology to the study of digital multilateralism (Langlet et al., 2022; Vadrot et al., 2021; Vadrot and Ruiz Rodríguez, 2022) doing digital team ethnography (Beneito-Montagut et al. 2017). While we could participate in most IGCs on site in teams of two or three researchers, we used digital ethnography to take field notes of IGC 1 retrospectively by watching the available webcast sessions and by participating at IGC 4 (where access by non-state actors was denied for health reasons to limit the number of participants during the COVID-19 pandemic) as registered online participant observers.
Field Sites and Participant Observers (PI = Principal Investigator; PhD1/2/3/4 = PhD Student, M1/2 = Master's Student 1/2).
From IGC 4 onwards, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, both registered on-site and online participation were possible; in some cases, this led to situations where a researcher on site could ask a remote researcher to take over when they had difficulties accessing the room. In addition, overflow rooms were available at the UN Headquarters for participants who could not access the negotiation room itself, which enabled them to follow the proceedings on large screens next door, creating a hybrid setting for field note-taking. Indeed, the field site significantly influenced note-taking practice by individual team members in three ways: firstly, whether the event was online, hybrid or on site, and the observer's mode of participation (on-site, online or hybrid); secondly, the meeting format being used (different access policies applied), ranging from webcast plenary and working group sessions (available to a wider public) to so-called ‘informal informals’ (where access by non-state observers was restricted); and, thirdly, the negotiation phase, which determined the parts of the text being discussed, and whether states made long general statements or reacted to individual provisions and options.
For all sessions (on-site, online or hybrid), our team used the same field note-taking template and method. This allowed us to develop a database to share and analyse data collectively within our team as well as to make field notes available to external researchers (Vadrot et al., 2024). On the basis of experiences with global environmental negotiations (Vadrot, 2014), we first designed a ‘matrix’ – an Excel sheet with predefined categories – streamlining what is observed and how events, observations and conversations are recorded (Figure 2). In line with Emerson et al. (2011), we made sharp distinctions between, on the one hand, recording what ‘others’ (state actors, non-state actors, secretariat staff, and other people in the negotiation room, including photographers, translators, journalists) said and did – the ‘data’ of fieldwork – and, on the other hand, writing specific notes incorporating our own thoughts and reactions to what we observed and how we interpreted it. Our matrix (see Figure 2) included several categories that researchers filled out while observing: A. type of observation (1- statement, 2- response, 3- interruption, 4- question, 5- other); B. actor (name of state or organisation); C. observation (what an actor did or said); D. comment_obs (our own thoughts and reactions, either descriptive, analytical, methodological or critical, a field that researchers used in different ways throughout the field note-taking process)2–4; E–K: basic information on part of the Agreement under negotiation (package element, name of provision, option, pro or contra); L. reference to science (yes or no, to facilitate later analysis of those parts of the negotiation where science was an issue); M, N: time (a time stamp was included for each observation entered into the matrix, allowing us, for instance, to measure how long a statement was or at what time an actor spoke, either in general terms or in relation to a specific provision); O. meeting format (plenary, informal working group, informal, intersessional or side event); and V. atmosphere/mood (used to indicate whether a situation was tense or when there was laughter in the room).
Extract of the matrix we developed for field note-taking (source: own, for the complete matrix see Annex 1).
The logic behind our matrix was to be able to track formal BBNJ agreement-making by recording our observations of who spoke when, about what, and for how long and record dynamics in the room. This allowed us to record: the sequence of interactions in the negotiation room, the formal interaction between different types of actors, and how what they said related to the legal text under negotiation and statements made by others. This approach facilitated the analysis of, for instance: actors’ positions, networks, conflicts and alliances (Langlet and Vadrot, 2023; Vadrot et al., 2021), but confined us to what happened inside the negotiation room – thus neglecting other meaningful interactions that might have a significant effect on the outcome.
While this strategy of taking detailed field notes of what was happening in the negotiation room allowed us to strive for some level of ‘completeness’ it did not automatically retain the ‘ethnographic character’ of ethnography. Researchers with a theoretical interest in ethnography as an epistemology beyond its usability as a data collection method (see Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2023) would have had to adopt different strategies to open spaces for critical reflection and ‘thick descriptions’. Some team members, indeed, went into the field armed with an additional notebook to write down those observations that they felt would not fit into our standardised matrix, a phenomenon described by Emerson et al. (2011) as a general challenge for ethnographic field note writing: ‘Even the most disciplined of ethnographers sometimes fail to live up to their own standards. Perhaps one of the most demanding aspects of fieldwork is the need that most ethnographers feel to expand the notes taken actually in the field into something that is fuller and more structured. Especially where the original notes are just brief, their meaning rapidly disintegrates unless they are expanded quickly after the events’ (Emerson et al., 2011: 125). While our field note-taking method helped us retain the meaning even when notes were brief, the sheer amount of observations might sometimes drown those moments when something meaningful happened (Yamineva, 2023).
Another way of adding an additional layer of ethnographic understanding to the field notes and provide contextual information was the conduct of interviews. Insights about negotiations behind closed doors or specific meanings of concepts used by delegates could be discussed informally and elaborated on through formal interviews (Yamineva, 2023).
Working as a team meant that we could share the tasks to prevent excessive tiredness of individual team members, who were taking notes for 3 or more hours in succession and 6 hours per day over a period of 2 weeks. In particular, on-site researchers struggled during the second negotiation week, when the pace of interaction would accelerate and negotiations become more dynamic and unpredictable. What was noticeable, from the beginning of our research in 2019 to the final session in June 2023, was that each researcher developed their own tacit knowledge on how to best use the matrix to record observations.
While we tried to learn from each other and streamline entries (e.g. introducing abbreviations such as ‘obo’ for ‘on behalf of’, or CHP for Common Heritage of Humankind Principle), we still developed individual, sometimes quite distinct ways of taking notes, adapting differently to the three above-described field site conditions: firstly, the type of event and participation (online, hybrid or on site), secondly, the meeting format and, thirdly, the negotiation phase.
Individual accounts of what writing negotiations looks like
To shed light on the practical aspects of writing field notes with the aid of our matrix, we provide a set of personal accounts reflecting on varied field site conditions, depending on: types of event and participation, meeting formats, and negotiation phases. The following accounts are written in first-person to exemplify the difference between team- and individual experiences.
The Principal Inverstigator (PI) and PhD student 1: IGC 2 on site
When we arrived at the site, we needed to find a place to sit down to be able to use our computers and the matrix. We found seats next to each other in the NGO sector overseeing the entire negotiation room. IGC 2 started with long opening statements, first by state delegates, then by non-state actors clarifying what they expected from the session and the Agreement. Large screens displaying the speakers and announcements by the Chair on who would speak next helped us identify actors. After the opening statements, states started discussing specific parts of the Agreement (the so-called ‘package elements’), referring to the ‘President's aid to negotiation’, which (after the first day) we printed out to be able to follow what was going on. Taking field notes and looking in parallel at the text under discussion was extremely beneficial to follow and record the interactions. We adapted the matrix accordingly and included categories/rows so that a given statement by an actor could be linked to the section of the text under consideration.
Thanks to the matrix, I had the impression that, at last, I could grasp the process and unpack the complex actors, statements, and interactions that I had struggled to record in my previous research. However, my ambition to obtain a ‘complete’ and ‘correct’ version of the process led me to (try to) transcribe everything that was said. As a result, there was little time and space left to include any personal reflections or interpretations in the column comment-obs. For this reason, I created a separate Word document into which I entered additional short notes every time I observed something that I considered meaningful. The rapid pace of the negotiations often did not allow for such notes to be taken; hence I started including brackets to insert such reflections straight after the transcript statements. After a few days, my fingers were hurting and, whenever I could, I started working with abbreviations or stopped transcribing when I had the impression that something was not meaningful enough; I considered this legitimate as long as the type of action, the actor, the observation, and the time were recorded.
Master's student 1 (M1): IGC 1 online, UN Web TV
Since IGC 1 had taken place before the research project started, the PI decided to use the webcast session available on UN Web TV to retrospectively take field notes and make sure our dataset was complete. I was commissioned with this task when I joined the project as a student assistant; although I was trained as a lawyer, I had no prior experience with treaty text negotiation practice. I took field notes during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020) in the kitchen of my 45 m2 shared apartment while my guitarist flatmate practiced and taught music online in the living room. I could hear the music from the kitchen, so I used headphones constantly. I worked on a very small table, and lacked an office chair, an external keyboard and enough natural light to make the work more comfortable. However, I had a good personal laptop whose standard-size screen could be divided into two halves in order to watch the videos and take notes simultaneously (Figure 3). I also had a hard copy of the President's guide to the negotiations by my side that I could read whenever necessary for my own understanding and proper field note-taking.
Split screen for simultaneous observation of videos and note-taking during the COVID-19 pandemic (source: own).
In these special circumstances, the videos enabled me to take thorough field notes of the statements because I could replay parts that I had not well understood. For the sake of clarity and efficiency, I filled columns O (‘negotiation_format’) and P ('side_main’) of the matrix (Figure 4) at the beginning of each plenary or informal working group, which took place one at a time in the UN negotiation room in New York.
Example of how M1 recorded interventions of the first session of negotiations.
Delegates spent most of their negotiating time in informal working groups and few plenaries took place. All delivered statements were long and of a general nature since they tried to shape the contents of the future Agreement draft and did not yet aim to draft treaty text. Opening and closing statements – and sometimes even general ones – were available on the Papersmart 5 website, easing my workload by enabling me to copy-paste the written statements into column D (‘comment_obs’). Thereafter, I noted the type of delivered statement in column W (‘doc_type’) and the link from which the written statement could be retrieved in column X (‘link’).
As Figure 4 shows, I documented the type of statement and the speaker, whose image and state affiliation I could clearly see thanks to the close-up by the camera. I filled column C (‘observation’) with the states’ alignments, then column D (‘comment_obs’) with the detailed statement and, finally, added a short description of the statement in column C. Afterwards, I would pause the video and fill columns E to N with the relevant information. The matrix automatically recorded the date and time at which a statement was typed so I had to constantly change these to the date and time at which the statement was delivered.
Subsequently, I entered whether: (1) the statement was delivered in a formal or informal manner in column T (‘formal_informal’), (2) the statement was part of traditional diplomatic practice in column U (‘routine’) and (3) the mood of the speaker was very positive (5) down to very negative (1) in column V (‘mood’). Then, I played the video, continued with the following statement and the cycle was repeated.
PhD student 1: IGC 3 on site
At IGC 3, the secretariat introduced the ‘informal informals’ for the first time. Access to these meetings by non-state actors was restricted and the Chatham House Rule applied (i.e. neither the identity nor the affiliation of a speaker may be revealed to people outside the negotiation room). The secretariat decided that a maximum of two persons from all observer delegations (NGOs) were allowed in the room at the same time. For our team, this meant that access to these meetings had to be negotiated with other observer delegations. Hence every morning the observer community would meet to decide who would attend the meeting and how note-taking should be distributed.
During the informal informals, we could observe negotiation dynamics that differed from the more formal proceedings; this had several important implications for our field note-taking practice. Unlike formal rooms, the conference room in which informal informals took place did not enjoy the full conference service. This meant that microphones displayed numbers instead of state names and that no interpreting service was available – hence all statements were made in English. This changed the dynamics of the negotiations in several significant ways, which also influenced our note-taking: firstly, facilitators and states addressed each other by seat number or the first name of the negotiator who requested the microphone rather than by state affiliation, which meant that sometimes the state was not immediately identifiable. Secondly, negotiators spoke much more freely, openly and informally which, in addition to the personal way in which they addressed each other, indicates that they perceived the informal informals as a safer space, one where they could speak personally and freely. Thirdly, overall the interactions were shorter, dealt more directly with the issue at hand, and negotiators interacted more dynamically.
As regards our note-taking, this meant that we had to adapt to a quicker interactive negotiating style and take notes of new expressions of views in rapid succession. If the state making a statement was not initially identifiable, we had to verify later on or deduct through our own knowledge who the negotiators spoke for. We also had to anonymize all speakers and any mentioning of personal names in our observations.
PhD student 3: IGC 4 on site
IGC 4 took place in March 2022 after more than 2 years of postponements resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the meantime, negotiators had met several times in online settings (Intersessional Work and High Seas Treaty Dialogue, see Langlet et al., 2022; Vadrot et al., 2021; Vadrot and Ruiz Rodríguez, 2022) to continue discussions, but several Parties insisted that any progress made during virtual meetings was of an informal nature and did not substitute for on-site negotiations.
While negotiators met again at the UN Headquarters in New York, non-state parties (such as NGOs or scientific observers) were not allowed to join owing to COVID-19 restrictions. We thus continued taking field notes online, which we had become used to throughout the extended intersessional period. Several team members were available, which meant that two team members were taking notes simultaneously at any point during the negotiations. It was felt that this could improve the quality of the notes, since unclear statements by negotiators could be discussed immediately and, also, because the two sets of notes could be merged later in case something was missing. Clearly, the depth of observation and involvement in the negotiation process cannot be the same remotely as on site, but it nevertheless allowed for continued empirical observations under difficult circumstances.
IGC 4 saw several written proposals, and although no consensus was reached at this point, it gave us an opportunity to follow and document the in-depth discussions on the contents of the Agreement's various articles and paragraphs. In an attempt to structure our observations accordingly, we paid close attention to the stances of each Party on specific sections and paragraphs of the text. In the ‘pro_contra’ column, combined with statement content in ‘comment_obs’, strong divergences could be recorded.
PhD student 2: IGC 5.1 on site and IGC 5.2 on site
I had participated in IGC 3, but what I experienced at IGC 5.1 and 5.2 was different, probably because the negotiations had entered their final stage. First of all, no side events were held on site. Secondly, these two IGCs were characterised by parallel ‘informal informals’ on various topics simultaneously to advance more quickly with the text. Within the collaborative ethnographic research team, the topics were divided between PhD1 and myself so that we could deal with our areas of expertise and cover other sessions flexibly (on demand) if necessary. The advantage was that the research team could cover all parallel sessions thanks to the participation of two team members on site and additional support by team members online who followed the negotiations and took field notes from the office in Vienna. A disadvantage of the parallel sessions was that I felt that I had a less comprehensive overview of all subjects than previously, when no parallel sessions were held and I could follow all topics. Daily morning briefings served to update the other team members on sessions followed and developments of the previous day.
Thirdly, I noticed a difference in negotiation dynamics: in the final IGCs, references to paragraphs in the legal draft texts took the place of lengthy explanations of topics. Quite often, speakers only mentioned the numbers of paragraphs and subparagraphs to be supported or deleted, since by now all negotiators were familiar with the text and concepts. I adjusted field note-taking in the matrix accordingly, by filling in only the columns concerning actors and paragraphs, with the related pros and cons and, where applicable, references to science. Thus, at this stage, field note-taking was facilitated significantly by the fact that I was already knowledgeable about the legal draft text and had developed an understanding of scientific and legal concepts. Being familiar with actors and their positions towards specific topics also facilitated my field note-taking towards the end of the IGCs: lines of argumentation were easier to follow when they were already expected thanks to past experience at other IGCs.
Lastly, another difference with earlier IGCs was the duration of sessions and lengthy discussions into the night. While at earlier IGCs, sessions had tended to end punctually, in the final stages of agreement-making they often extended over the allotted time. This sometimes posed a challenge if interviews had been scheduled for, but the team adapted accordingly with back-up team members who jumped in whenever needed by conducting digital ethnography. As for the final day of negotiations, it was truly exceptional – that even came as a surprise to experienced lawyers attending the negotiations: the session lasted over 36 hours behind closed doors without any break and little communication about when the plenary was about to start again. With both PhD1 and myself being on site, this was also manageable by taking turns in following the news from the secretariat and other actors, and informing the online team in Vienna.
Master's student 2 (M2): IGC 5.2. online, IGC 5.3 online
My role was mostly of a supportive nature. While PhD students 1 and 2 were on site in New York, I observed the negotiations remotely from Vienna. Because of the time difference, workdays usually began in the afternoon with a daily briefing, joined by the PI, with the PhD students on site – and often ended past midnight. On all days where plenary sessions took place, I covered them by watching the stream on UN Web TV. Plenaries were held in the late afternoon local Vienna time. I took advantage of a well-equipped workplace, using three monitors in total: one displaying the negotiated draft text, the second one showing the matrix (see Figure 5), and the third one transmitting the live broadcast. Additionally, I had time to prepare a quiet and well set-up working environment in advance for the intense note-taking sessions. While watching the broadcast, I took notes in parallel, looking at the draft whenever necessary to better understand what was being discussed.
Example of how M2 recorded interventions on a range of options in the treaty text.
During IGC 5.2 plenary sessions, the work of ‘informal informal’ sessions was reported back to all states, since not all delegations had necessarily been able to participate in all parallel meetings. Thus, during the short daily plenary, all package elements were reviewed briefly in relation to specific articles or paragraphs that had been discussed before. As the screenshot below shows (Figure 5), I entered both the form of the statement and who spoke; this was easily detected because the webcast always focuses on the person speaking, while the display shows the name of the state. In the ‘observation’ column, I briefly described what the statement or report was about. I filled in the ‘comment_obs’ column in detail, entering the content of the statement by the actor. Reports frequently lasted for several minutes, so I often quickly moved to the next columns to enter the specific packages and articles that reports focused on, and I created new lines when the facilitator switched towards the next article or paragraph. In many cases, I filled the columns of ‘package’ and ‘section_title’ directly after the plenary because the proceedings were often too fast to fill out all the columns in real time. In addition to the daily coverage of plenaries, I provided additional support to on-site colleagues whenever help was needed. PhD student 2, for example, had some health issues on one day, so I covered those sessions. I had access to streams of the informal meetings since the team was a registered participant; they were otherwise inaccessible to the general public.
Epistemological, practical and ethical considerations
Recording observations, events and conversations, or study face-to-face relations or the sequence of interactions is not always straightforward for participant observers (Tjora, 2006; Wolfinger, 2002). Researchers go into the field striving for a level of completeness and accuracy in their accounts of a specific ‘social world’ or ‘social reality’ that is hard to achieve. More specifically, participant observation during a global environmental conference is challenging because it involves recording many actors, sites, processes and dynamics shaped by diplomatic routines and a habitus that even experts find difficult to describe or distinguish from other forms of human behaviour and interaction (Sharp, 2009). As a research team involved in a 5-year project on the making of a new legally binding agreement, examining how states – despite divergent interests and views – managed to agree on a common language in the end, we often found ourselves joking that the easiest way to conduct this type of research would be to tag all delegates and let artificial intelligence do the job of identifying patterns meaningful enough to explain the making of global order.
Instead, we engaged in collaborative field note data collection, using a field note-taking method and tool (the matrix) that allowed all of us to approach our research object from a similar perspective and with a shared objective: to understand the making of a new agreement over a period of 5 years and many negotiation sessions. However, we do acknowledge a number of epistemological, practical and ethical challenges of applying our field note-taking method and tool, to which we now turn.
Firstly, while we consider our research to fall within the tradition of CEE (Campbell et al., 2014; Hughes et al., 2021; Vadrot, 2020), epistemologically striving for rich descriptions of social realities, we need to acknowledge that our matrix and the pace of negotiations left little room for knowing the world from the standpoint of its social relations by taking serious members’ meanings, and learning ‘about their theoretical and pragmatic insights’ (Boellstorff et al. 2012: 16). In fact, an additional note-taking device and practice were often used by members of our research team to create a space for critical reflection (e.g. on power-in-place, ‘moments of influence’ and the politics of knowledge production, see Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2023, who distinguish between ethnographic methods and ethnography) and for positionality (e.g. in what way do we influence the setting by being considered knowledgeable and by publishing about the process and by talking to actors). Thus, a central component of ethnographic research, ‘entailing epistemological and ontological commitments that pulse throughout the entire research design from conceptualization to output’ (Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti, 2023: 187), was moved to the periphery for the purpose of collecting field note data that could be used by all for varied research objectives, while aspiring to track, quantify and map a 5-year-long agreement-making process (Vadrot, 2020).
Our method of taking field notes (i.e. the observer filling in a set of predefined categories and rows) requires standardising field note data to some extent. Nevertheless, we tried to show in this article that the complexity of the field site (negotiation type, meeting format and negotiation phase) and the diverse conditions that researchers encountered when taking notes (on site, online or in a hybrid setting) leave room for different ways of writing up accounts of negotiations and tackling the problem of implicit interpretation (Tjora, 2006). In particular, the latter arose when a researcher had to decide whether a state was in favour or against a given provision, and in relation to recording non-verbal behaviour. PhD2, for instance, often used the row ‘type of action’ 5 (in A) to write down notes such as ‘Paraguay angry’, ‘US not amused’, or ‘EU strict’, something which nobody else did. In addition, degrees of completeness differ significantly: while M1 accurately transcribed the entire IGC 1 (partly thanks to the fact that the conference was recorded and jumping between sessions was easy), others only used keywords to account for what was said by a specific actor. As noted by the PI, when they suffered from fatigue or loss of concentration (caused by the intensity of the field note-taking method), researchers tended to take detailed notes only on those aspects that seemed meaningful and needed to be retained from the researcher's subjective point of view. In other words, while our method allows some data to be collected in a largely complete manner – what we considered the basic information of an observation: who spoke, when, about what, and in relation to which parts of the text – the more detailed and nuanced elements of what exactly was said, in what mood, and with what political weight, remain subjective; yet they are highly important for interpreting the data and attaching meaning to what was observed.
The second challenge that we emphasise relates to the practical aspects of writing this type of field notes and the barriers encountered by researchers when seeking access or navigating the space of environmental diplomacy. We applied our matrix as a team and while our tool is also useful for solo researchers, its use may be challenging when following longer negotiations and trying to ensure that data will be usable afterwards. Despite our striving for completeness, our dataset does include gaps, typos, contradictions and errors; we tried to fix these through very time-consuming data curation and management, which not all research teams or solo researchers might be prepared for, or willing to carry out.
In addition, global environmental conferences are exclusive meetings that follow the rules and procedures of multilateral diplomacy; these are based on a specific habitus and language that are sometimes difficult to grasp or follow. Members of our research team needed time to adapt to the field site and feel comfortable with the dominant technical language and diplomatic habitus. While our field note-taking method and tool may facilitate the navigation of such settings by suggesting what to focus on and how to keep track of the process, applying the tool when first arriving at the site may be overwhelming: instead of discovering what is happening simply by being there, one dives straight into the data collection process. In addition, as highlighted by Hughes et al. (2021) and Vadrot and Hughes (2023), conducting research during a negotiation event can be expensive, hence systematically excluding researchers from developing countries. Decolonising ethnographic knowing, as suggested by Dutta (2021), would require reflecting not only on our field note-taking method, but on the very practice of negotiating global environmental agreements in the restrained venues of multilateral diplomacy.
Thirdly, the ethical stakes in negotiation research and global environmental diplomacy are high (as illustrated by the need to decolonise ethnographic knowing and change environmental policy negotiating practices) (Vecchione-Gonçalves and Hughes, 2023). As shown by the varied set of on-site individual experiences, several members of our research team were confronted with changed access rules and conditions whilst recording observations at the field site. Equipped with two positive responses from a national and European ethics commission, going into the field felt much safer. Still, throughout the research project we needed to develop a sensitivity for whether field-note taking was appropriate in particular sitautions or not.
Ethics also need to be considered when sharing the data with external researchers – this requires careful consideration of which data falls under Chatham House Rules and on appropriate anonymisation of actors (Vadrot et al., 2024). Being aware of the kind of data that may be collected and having a sense of responsibility for the purposes it can be used for is essential in order to avoid a loss of trust among researchers (participant) observers and the community that is letting us into sites where the global order is negotiated (Armstrong et al., 2022). This meant that we had to anonymize roughly half of our dataset before making it available to the wider public (Vadrot et al., 2024), especially those entries concerning what we observed during ‘informal informals’. Although we cannot use the entire dataset, and our field note-taking tool made it harder to become immersed in, for us, it provided the unique opportunity to engage in a joint research endeavour without dismissing the diversity of research interests of individual team members that used the data for a variety of qualitative and quantitative analyses unpacking the BBNJ negotiation process.
Conclusion
We consider our collective and collaborative field note-taking practice a key methodological innovation that might be valuable for scholars researching negotiation processes both in and beyond the field of global environmental politics; this would include diplomatic practices and United Nations meetings in areas such as health, trade, plastic pollution, human rights, climate change and biodiversity loss. In fact, our field note-taking template could be used in any setting where actors interact both with each other and a legal text within a predefined meeting framework, including at the local and national government levels, such as parliaments and assemblies, and that of the European Union and its Agencies.
The standardisation and structure of our field note-taking approach allowed us to move beyond existing CEE approaches, enabling the use of our data for several types of quantitative and qualitative analysis, including the struggle over specific concepts (Tessnow-von Wysocki and Vadrot, 2022; Vadrot et al., 2021), social networks and competition between international organisations (Langlet and Vadrot, 2023, 2024) differences between on-site and digital diplomacy (Vadrot and Ruiz Rodríguez, 2022), and pathways of scientific input into the negotiations (Tessnow-von Wysocki and Vadrot, 2024). According to our experience, such structured methodological elements can combine nicely with more conventional ethnographic note-taking within the overall framework of CEE and across the research life cycle from design, data collection, analysis, data curation and management, interpretation and (depending on the ontological and epistemological commitments of the researcher) writing.
Finally, our collaborative field-note taking method makes it possible for other researcher to use our data. We constructed a database, which systematically catalogues observations covering the entire BBNJ negotiations from September 2018 until June 2023 (Vadrot et al., 2024). By providing primary data on the whole negotiation process, the MARIPOLDATAbase supports empirical scholarly work on diverse aspects of international marine biodiversity politics and facilitates the use of primary negotiation data. With the MARIPOLDATAbase, we have been exploring new pathways of negotiation research and broadened our understanding of global environmental meetings as organised social spaces (Langlet and Vadrot, 2024) and agreement-making sites (Hughes and Vadrot, 2023). We also wish to encourage other researchers to use our matrix and method; indeed, owing to its composition and the immense amount of time invested in data curation and management, we have made it accessible to researchers outside our core data collection team.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research presented in this paperis part of the MARIPOLDATA project led by Prof. Alice Vadrot (www.maripoldata.eu) that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme] (Grant agreement No. 804599). The authors give special thanks to the International Studies Association (ISA), United Nations Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea (UNDOALOS), and the organisers of the BBNJ Informal Dialogues for granting access of the research team to the different BBNJ negotiation formats. We thank our advisory network, colleagues, and critical friends, who have supported our research since 2018.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council (grant number 804599).
Notes
Author biographies
Alice B. M. Vadrot is a professor of international relations and environment at the Department of Political Science of the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on global environmental agreement-making in the areas of (marine) biodiversity and ocean protection.
Paul Dunshirn is a researcher at Twin Politics, University of Vienna. He is an expert in the field of genetic resource government. His current research maps the use of digital models in ocean management.
Arne Langlet is a senior scientist at the University of Vienna, where he also received his PhD. He works on ocean governance, international environmental negotiations and organizations using data-driven methods and social network analysis.
Simon J. Fellinger is coordinator of Biodiversity Austria - International, the Austrian platform for IPBES. He is interested in science - policy interfaces and advisory bodies. He obtained a master's degree in political science from the University of Vienna.
Silvia C. Ruiz-Rodríguez is a PhD researcher at the University of Vienna, focusing on in-person and digital multilateral diplomacy at marine biodiversity negotiations.
Ina Tessnow-von Wysocki is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS). Her research focuses on international ocean governance. She obtained her PhD in Political Science from the University of Vienna as part of the MARIPOLDATA project.