I'm currently reading the paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9405171 by Banados. I am just getting acquainted with the details of Chern-Simons, and I'm hoping that someone can explain/elaborate on the following statement:

In a field theory with no degrees of freedom like Chern-Simons theory, the only relevant degrees of freedom are holonomies or global charges.

I've also heard things like "Chern-Simons is topological" which sounds related. Is it?

I'm currently reading the paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9405171 by Banados. I am just getting acquainted with the details of Chern-Simons theory, and I'm hoping that someone can explain/elaborate on the following statement:

In a field theory with no degrees of freedom like Chern-Simons theory, the only relevant degrees of freedom are holonomies or global charges.

I've also heard things like "Chern-Simons is topological" which sounds related. Is it?