Counter-intermediation strategies in transition policy-making: Exploration of the global plastics treaty negotiations

Intermediation often plays a critical role in transition policy-making. Whereas most studies have focused on policy intermediation in favor of sustainability transitions, this paper explores the opposite: strategies that undermine ‘pro-transition’ policy intermediation. We study a timely ecology of intermediation in policy-making: the negotiations for a global, legally binding plastic treaty, with the United Nations as the key intermediary. Our findings are based on ethnographic research of over 400 h of observation over 28 months, including five international negotiation sessions. We identify five strategies of what we call ‘counter-intermediation’: (i) gain access, (ii) reduce ambition, (iii) question knowledge, (iv) hamper consensus building, and (v) hamper process facilitation. In our case, the counter-intermediation strategies have three targets: policy content, negotiation, and process facilitation. The strategies can destabilize intermediation processes to the extent of intermediation failure. We show how actors within ecologies of intermediation may contest and bend intermediation processes, ultimately shaping the ecologies they operate in. Our findings can help to make intermediation processes more resilient to counter-intermediation, and to better navigate (policy) processes already impacted by counter-intermediation.