At Rio+20, we organized ourselves into three sub-groups, focused on human rights, corporate sustainability, and the blue economy.  Collaboration in the larger team was constrained by a meeting venue 30-60 minutes by shuttle from most hotels, a separate location for the UN Global Compact for corporate sustainability, a 12/hour/day formal program with few breaks, and few places to meet when breaks occurred. Without core funding for the research, we had few incentives to overcome these constraints to broad collaboration and instead prioritized our work in sub-groups. 

Sub-groups had momentum from past CEEs, and focusing more narrowly on these interests allowed us to think about meetings in relation to one another over time, which in turn influenced our emerging understanding of global environmental governance and processes of assemblage. 

Catherine Corson also involved Mount Holyoke undergraduates, and took advantage of the college’s proximately to UN headquarters in New York City to initiated a pilot project to study the preparatory process for the conference. This expanded the CEE method to capture multiple stages of negotiations, which helps to better understand in what ways ‘the meeting’ matters.