Environmental Skepticism: Ecology, Power, and Public Life (review)

outside the bureaucratic fence-line seems underplayed. Nevertheless, patterns do emerge across the cases. With the exception of the sluggish IMO Secretariat and the “strait-jacketed” climate secretariat, all the bureaucracies studied here generate signiacant amounts of cognitive inouence, through processes of knowledge creation, knowledge synthesizing, and knowledge dissemination. There is also evidence in some cases of autonomous inouence on rulemaking. As the volume’s conclusion suggests, there is much less evidence of “executive” inouence, in the sense of enhancing state capacity, beyond the substantial inouence of the disproportionately-endowed World Bank. To explain variation in inouence, the authors and that while problem structure matters, much of the explanatory power resides in the bureaucracies’ people and procedures, as well as the “polity” or contextual framework created by states. With regard to the latter, resource endowments and formal/legal institutional frameworks are found to be poor predictors of inouence; more important is the way in which the bureaucracy is embedded in larger institutional/ organizational frameworks. The andings with regard to people and procedures reproduce some broad patterns in the wider literature: expertise is power, as are oexible hierarchies with strong leadership. As the authors suggest, the stakes here are high, for global problemsolving, for democratic practice in the international spaces of political life, and for anding a path through the mineaeld of “institutional reform” in global environmental governance. Managers of Global Change provides a welcome return to careful attention to the possibilities and patterns of organizational agency.