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Mixed Methods Analysis of Global Plastics Negotiations through Reports and Data
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Researchers applied quantitative text analysis and qualitative review to official reports from all six UN plastics treaty negotiating sessions, revealing how issue emphasis, framing, and negotiating tone shifted across sessions — offering systematic insight into the political dynamics shaping a potential global plastics agreement.
Plastic pollution has become a major global environmental challenge in the 21st century. This led the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) to create a historical revolution, which created an international legally binding instrument (ILBI) to address plastic pollution across its full life cycle. These negotiations, overseen by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), took place over the past three years, with a total of six sessions. These negotiations included debates over treaty scope, means of implementation, financing, and much more. Despite the clear impact and relevance of these debates, systematic analysis of the negotiation process itself is currently limited. This project applies a mixed-methods approach to determine patterns within the global plastics negotiations. Using the official Environmental Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) reports for the negotiations, we conducted quantitative text analysis, including word frequency analysis, bag-of-words modeling, and sentiment analysis, to identify shifts in issue emphasis and tone of negotiation across INC sessions. In addition to these quantitative findings, we used a qualitative analysis of the negotiations, which gave the broader political trends of the negotiations. In using this new mixed-methods approach, this project seeks to identify emerging patterns in negotiation dynamics, issue framing, and environmental policy
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