NGOs comprise over half the cumulative number of delegates attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) for the 1995–2009 period. These NGOs represent a wide array of issues, including sustainable development, business, and higher education, to name just a few. Based on UNFCCC publicly available participation statistics, this article analyzes NGO participation from a quantitative issue-based perspective, and compares the results with the relevant conclusions drawn by the other contributors to this special issue. The findings of this analysis confirm informed expectations about issue-driven NGO participation. In particular, three main findings are that: (1) environment and conservation, academic, business, and energy NGOs dominate civil society participation in the UNFCCC; (2) UNFCCC constituencies do not adequately capture the range of issues addressed by observer NGOs; and (3) since 2007, NGO participation has sig-nificantly increased and diversified.

The Global Environmental Governance (GEG) system has grown significantly since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. In this paper we analyze ten leading Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), reviewing various quantitative indicators (related to time, resources and commitment) to chart their evolution and to measure the “negotiation burden” that the burgeoning GEG system is imposing on states and secretariats. We find that these representative MEAs have not only grown in size but also have become busier over time, although there are indications that as the GEG system “matures,” it may also be stabilizing. Among other things, we find that the reported budget for these ten MEA secretariats has grown nine-fold in sixteen years, from US$ 8.18 million in 1992 to US$ 75.83 million in 2007. Counting only the most important of meetings, and using the number of meeting days as an indicator of the “negotiation load,” we find that the negotiation load for the leading MEAs has stabilized, averaging around 115 meeting days per year. Decisions also seem to plateau at about 185 per year.