ABSTRACT
International bureaucracies play an increasing role in world politics in several policy fi elds. One type of international bureaucracy that is often overlooked is the secretariat related to international treaty regimes. While many international regimes rely for their secretarial functions on full-fl edged international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), other treaty regimes maintain merely weak links to specialized United Nations (UN) agencies. Instead, such treaties have set up their own independent bureaucracies, the so-called secretariats.
