TY - JOUR
A1 - Sommerer, Thomas
A1 - Squatrito, Theresa
A1 - Tallberg, Jonas
A1 - Lundgren, Magnus
T1 - Decision-making in international organizations
BT - institutional design and performance
JF - The review of international organizations
N2 - International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.
KW - international organizations
KW - institutional design
KW - decision-making
KW - global governance
KW - performance
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-021-09445-x
SN - 1559-7431
SN - 1559-744X
VL - 17
IS - 4
SP - 815
EP - 845
PB - Springer
CY - Boston
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Lundgren, Magnus
A1 - Squatrito, Theresa
A1 - Sommerer, Thomas
A1 - Tallberg, Jonas
T1 - Introducing the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD)
JF - The review of international organizations
N2 - There is a growing recognition that international organizations (IOs) formulate and adopt policy in a wide range of areas. IOs have emerged as key venues for states seeking joint solutions to contemporary challenges such as climate change or COVID-19, and to establish frameworks to bolster trade, development, security, and more. In this capacity, IOs produce both extraordinary and routine policy output with a multitude of purposes, ranging from policies of historic significance like admitting new members to the more mundane tasks of administering IO staff. This article introduces the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD), which covers close to 37,000 individual policy acts of 13 multi-issue IOs in the 1980–2015 period. The dataset fills a gap in the growing body of literature on the comparative study of IOs, providing researchers with a fine-grained perspective on the structure of IO policy output and data for comparisons across time, policy areas, and organizations. This article describes the construction and coverage of the dataset and identifies key temporal and cross-sectional patterns revealed by the data. In a concise illustration of the dataset’s utility, we apply models of punctuated equilibria in a comparative study of the relationship between institutional features and broad policy agenda dynamics. Overall, the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset offers a unique resource for researchers to analyze IO policy output in a granular manner and to explore questions of responsiveness, performance, and legitimacy of IOs.
KW - international organizations
KW - policy
KW - policy agendas
KW - decision-making
Y1 - 2023
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-023-09492-6
SN - 1559-7431
SN - 1559-744X
VL - 19
SP - 117
EP - 146
PB - Springer
CY - Boston
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Hecke, Steven van
A1 - Fuhr, Harald
A1 - Wolfs, Wouter
T1 - The politics of crisis management by regional and international organizations in fighting against a global pandemic
BT - the member states at a crossroads
JF - International review of administrative sciences : an international journal of comparative public administration
N2 - Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organizations recently went through turbulent times due to a lack of support from several of their member states. Next to this crisis of multilateralism, the COVID-19 pandemic now seems to question the added value of international organizations for addressing global governance issues more specifically. This article analyses this double challenge that several organizations are facing and compares their ways of managing the crisis by looking at their institutional and political context, their governance structure, and their behaviour during the pandemic until June 2020. More specifically, it will explain the different and fragmented responses of the World Health Organization, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. With the aim of understanding the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve, this article argues that the level of autonomy vis-a-vis the member states is crucial for understanding the politics of crisis management.
Points for practitioners
As intergovernmental bodies, international organizations require authorization by their member states. Since they also need funding for their operations, different degrees of autonomy also matter for reacting to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential for international organizations is limited, though through proactive and bold initiatives, they can seize the opportunity of the crisis and partly overcome institutional and political constraints.
KW - autonomy
KW - COVID-19
KW - crisis management
KW - European Union
KW - International
KW - Monetary Fund
KW - international organizations
KW - multilateralism
KW - World Bank
KW - World Health Organization
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320984516
SN - 0020-8523
SN - 1461-7226
VL - 87
IS - 3
SP - 672
EP - 690
PB - Sage
CY - Los Angeles, Calif. [u.a.]
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Fleischer, Julia
A1 - Reiners, Nina
T1 - Connecting international relations and public administration
BT - toward a joint research agenda for the study of international bureaucracy
JF - International studies review
N2 - The recent debate on administrative bodies in international organizations has brought forward multiple theoretical perspectives, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches. Despite these efforts to advance knowledge on these actors, the research program on international public administrations (IPAs) has missed out on two important opportunities: reflection on scholarship in international relations (IR) and public administration and synergies between these disciplinary perspectives. Against this backdrop, the essay is a discussion of the literature on IPAs in IR and public administration. We found influence, authority, and autonomy of international bureaucracies have been widely addressed and helped to better understand the agency of such non-state actors in global policy-making. Less attention has been given to the crucial macro-level context of politics for administrative bodies, despite the importance in IR and public administration scholarship. We propose a focus on agency and politics as future avenues for a comprehensive, joint research agenda for international bureaucracies.
N2 - El reciente debate sobre los organismos administrativos en las organizaciones internacionales ha generado diversas perspectivas teóricas, marcos analíticos y enfoques metodológicos. A pesar de estos esfuerzos por mejorar el conocimiento sobre estos actores, el programa de investigación sobre las administraciones públicas internacionales (International Public Administration, IPA) ha perdido dos oportunidades importantes: la reflexión sobre la erudición en las relaciones internacionales y la administración pública y las sinergias entre estas perspectivas disciplinarias. Con este trasfondo, en el ensayo se analiza la literatura sobre las administraciones públicas internacionales en las relaciones internacionales y la administración pública. Descubrimos que la influencia, la autoridad y la autonomía de las burocracias internacionales se han abordado ampliamente y ayudaron a comprender mejor la función de dichos agentes no estatales en la formulación de políticas a nivel mundial. Se ha prestado menos atención al contexto clave a nivel macro de la política de los organismos administrativos, a pesar de su importancia en las relaciones internacionales y la erudición en la administración pública. Proponemos enfocarnos en la agencia y la política como futuras vías para implementar un programa de investigación conjunta y exhaustiva para las burocracias internacionales.
N2 - Le récent débat sur les organes administratifs des organisations internationales a mis en avant plusieurs perspectives théoriques, cadres analytiques et approches méthodologiques. Malgré ces efforts pour faire progresser la connaissance de ces acteurs, le Programme de recherche sur les administrations publiques internationales a manqué deux opportunités majeures : une réflexion sur les recherches en relations internationales et administration publique ainsi que sur les synergies entre ces perspectives des disciplines. Cet essai s'appuie sur cette toile de fond pour établir une discussion au sujet de la littérature abordant les administrations publiques internationales dans les domaines des relations internationales et de l'administration publique. Nous avons constaté que l'influence, l'autorité et l'autonomie des bureaucraties internationales avaient été largement abordées, ce qui permettait de mieux comprendre le pouvoir de tels acteurs non-étatiques dans l’établissement des politiques internationales. Toutefois, malgré son importance dans les recherches en relations internationales et administration publique, une moins grande attention a été accordée au contexte macro des politiques des organes administratifs alors qu'il est crucial. Nous proposons de mettre l'accent sur le pouvoir et les politiques comme pistes futures pour un programme de recherche conjoint complet sur les bureaucraties internationales.
KW - international bureaucracies
KW - international organizations
KW - public
KW - administration
KW - nonstate actors
KW - palabras clave
KW - burocracias internacionales
KW - organizaciones internacionales
KW - administración pública
KW - agentes no estatales
KW - mots clés
KW - bureaucraties internationales
KW - organisations internationales
KW - administration publique
KW - acteurs non-étatiques
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viaa097
SN - 1521-9488
SN - 1468-2486
VL - 23
IS - 4
SP - 1230
EP - 1247
PB - Oxford Univ. Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heucher, Angela
T1 - Evolving Order? Inter-Organizational Relations in the Organizational
JF - Forum for Development Studies
N2 - Global food security governance is fraught with fragmentation, overlap and complexity. While calls for coordination and coherence abound, establishing an inter-organizational order at this level seems to remain difficult. While the emphasis in the literature has so far been on the global level, we know less about dynamics of inter-organizational relations in food security governance at the country level, and empirical studies are lacking. It is this research gap the article seeks to address by posing the following research question: In how far does inter-organizational order develop in the organizational field of food security governance at the country level? Theoretically and conceptually, the article draws on sociological institutionalism, and on work on inter-organizational relations. Empirically, the article conducts an exploratory case study of the organizational field of food security governance in Côte d’Ivoire, building on a qualitative content analysis of organizational documents covering a period from 2003 to 2016 and semi-structured interviews with staff of international organizations from 2016. The article demonstrates that not all of the developments attributed to food security governance at the global level play out in the same way at the country level. Rather, in the case of Côte d’Ivoire there are signs for a certain degree of coherence between IOs in the field of food security governance and even for an – albeit limited – division of labour. However, this only holds for specific dimensions of the inter-organizational order and appears to be subject to continuous contestation and reinterpretation under the surface.
KW - inter-organizational relations
KW - international organizations
KW - organizational fields
KW - inter-organizational order
KW - food security governance
Y1 - 2019
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2018.1562962
SN - 0803-9410
SN - 1891-1765
VL - 46
IS - 3
SP - 501
EP - 526
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
T1 - The autonomy of international bureaucracies as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers
JF - Politische Vierteljahresschrift : Zeitschrift der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft
N2 - International public administrations are increasingly perceived as autonomous actors prompting states to adopt policies without resorting to coercion or legal obligations. Starting from these observations, I determine abilities and characteristics of international public administrations that contribute to their autonomy as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers. To this end, I draw on theoretical considerations and empirical results from policy transfer research. I find that the various abilities that contribute to this autonomy of international public administrations are essentially rooted in two structural characteristics: in as many states as possible their staff should (a) be present and (b) analyze the state, development and reform need of national policies on a regular basis.
KW - international organizations
KW - international bureaucracies
KW - autonomy
KW - policy transfer
Y1 - 2014
SN - 0032-3470
SN - 1862-2860
SP - 105
EP - +
PB - Nomos
CY - Hannover
ER -