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This paper starts from the premise that Western states are connected to some of the harms refugees suffer from. It specifically focuses on the harm of acts of misrecognition and its relation to epistemic injustice that refugees suffer from in refugee camps, in detention centers, and during their desperate attempts to find refuge. The paper discusses the relation between hermeneutical injustice and acts of misrecognition, showing that these two phenomena are interconnected and that acts of misrecognition are particularly damaging when (a) they stretch over different contexts, leaving us without or with very few safe spaces, and (b) they dislocate us, leaving us without a community to turn to. The paper then considers the ways in which refugees experience acts of misrecognition and suffer from hermeneutical injustice, using the case of unaccompanied children at the well-known and overcrowded camp Moria in Greece, the case of unsafe detention centers in Libya, and the case of the denial to assistance on the Mediterranean and the resulting pushbacks from international waters to Libya as well as the preventable drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean to illustrate the arguments. Finally, the paper argues for specific duties toward refugees that result from the prior arguments on misrecognition and hermeneutical injustice.
The digitalization of public administration is increasingly moving forward. This systematic literature review analyzes empirical studies that explore the impacts of digitalization projects (n=93) in the public sector. Bibliometrically, only a few authors have published several times on this topic so far. Most studies focusing on impact come from the US or China, and are related to Computer Science. In terms of content, the majority of examined articles studies services to citizens, and therefore consider them when measuring impact. A classification of the investigated effects by dimensions of public value shows that the analysis of utilitarian-instrumental values, such as efficiency or performance, is prevalent. More interdisciplinary cooperation is needed to research the impact of digitalization in the public sector. The different dimensions of impact should be linked more closely. In addition, research should focus more on the effects of digitalization within administration.
The legitimacy and effectiveness of international organizations are often linked directly to issues of representation—not only on their high-level governing boards and in top leadership but also within their staff. This article explores two key questions of bureaucratic representation in the critical cases of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. First, we seek to unpack three essential dimensions of staff representation—nationality, education, and gender—to explain how representation may matter for international organizations. Second, we aim to describe the multiple dimensions of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over the past twenty years by deploying a novel dataset on staff demographics, focusing on ranks with decision-making authority within the institutions. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made considerable efforts to diversify their bureaucracies. Nonetheless, representation remains uneven; for example, nationals from middle- and low-income countries, women, and staff without economics degrees from prominent US- or UK-based universities are less present in key leadership positions. These results may be well explained by the particular needs of the institutions’ technical mandates and limits in the supply of qualified staff and, as such, need not be seen as suboptimal. Nonetheless, perceived imbalances in representation may continue to pose external legitimation and operational challenges to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a complex political environment where such multidimensional representation is important to sustaining the buy-in of donor and borrower countries alike. To this end, we recommend that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enhance their diversity and inclusion efforts by increasing transparency via reporting disaggregated data on workforce composition and introducing annual requirements to publish progress reports with management feedback to strengthen internal and external accountability.
Divided loyalties?
(2022)
Many operational International Organizations (IOs) rely on national staff when implementing projects in member states. However, fears persist that the loyalties of national IO staff may be divided when working in their home countries. The article studies differences in more than 50,000 procurement decisions taken in 1729 projects overseen by World Bank staff working as expatriates or in their home countries. The empirical results show that when staff work in their home countries, national suppliers' probability of winning procurement contracts increases. However, these increases are not driven by restricted procurement processes—that exclude competition—which are often seen as red flags for corruption. Instead, restricted procurement processes seem to be less likely when staff work in their home countries. These findings imply that national IO staff use their country-specific knowledge to increase the development effectiveness of procurement in line with the mandate of the World Bank.
Donors of development assistance for health typically provide funding for a range of disease focus areas, such as maternal health and child health, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other infectious diseases. But funding for each disease category does not match closely its contribution to the disability and loss of life it causes and the cost-effectiveness of interventions. We argue that peer influences in the social construction of global health priorities contribute to explaining this misalignment. Aid policy-makers are embedded in a social environment encompassing other donors, health experts, advocacy groups, and international officials. This social environment influences the conceptual and normative frameworks of decision-makers, which in turn affect their funding priorities. Aid policy-makers are especially likely to emulate decisions on funding priorities taken by peers with whom they are most closely involved in the context of expert and advocacy networks. We draw on novel data on donor connectivity through health IGOs and health INGOs and assess the argument by applying spatial regression models to health aid disbursed globally between 1990 and 2017. The analysis provides strong empirical support for our argument that the involvement in overlapping expert and advocacy networks shapes funding priorities regarding disease categories and recipient countries in health aid.
Harmful side effects
(2022)
Governments have increasingly adopted laws restricting the activities of international non-governmental organizations INGOs within their borders. Such laws are often intended to curb the ability of critical INGOs to discover and communicate government failures and abuses to domestic and international audiences. They can also have the unintended effect of reducing the presence and activities of INGOs working on health issues, and depriving local health workers and organizations of access to resources, knowledge and other forms of support. This study assesses whether legislative restrictions on INGOs are associated with fewer health INGOs in a wide range of countries and with the ability of those countries to mitigate disability-adjusted life years lost because of twenty-one disease categories between 1993 and 2017. The findings indicate that restrictive legislation hampered efforts by civil society to lighten the global burden of disease and had adverse side effects on the health of citizens worldwide.
This study evaluates the challenges, institutional impacts and responses of German local authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic from a political science point of view. The main research question is how they have contributed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent the strengths and weaknesses of the German model of municipal autonomy have influenced their policy. It analyses the adaptation strategies of German local authorities and assesses the effectiveness of their actions up to now. Their implementation is then evaluated in five selected issues, e.g. adjustment organization and staff, challenges for local finances, local politics and citizen’s participation. This analysis is reflecting the scientific debate in Germany since the beginning of 2020, based on the available analyses of political science, law, economics, sociology and geography until end of March 2021.
Weathering the storm?
(2023)
Democratization scholars are currently debating if we are indeed witnessing a third wave of autocratization. While this has led to an extensive debate about the future of the liberal international order, we still know relatively little about the consequences of autocratization for international organizations (IOs). In this article, we explore to what extent autocratization has led to changes in the composition of IO membership. We propose three different ways of conceptualizing autocratization of IO membership. We argue that we should move away from a dichotomous understanding of regime type and regime change, but rather focus on composition of subregime types to understand current developments. We build on updated membership data for 73 IOs through 2020 to map membership configurations based on the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index. Contrary to current debates on the crisis of the liberal order, we find that many IOs are not (yet) affected by broad autocratization of their membership that would endanger democratic majorities or overall democratic densities. However, we also observe the disappearance of formerly homogenous democratic clubs due to democratic backsliding in a number of European and Latin American IO member states, as well as a return of autocratic clubs in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa. These findings have important implications for the broader research agenda on international democracy promotion and human right protection as well as the study of legitimacy and the effectiveness of international organizations.
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
After some seventy years of intensive debates, there is an increasingly strong consensus within the academic and practitioner communities that development is both an objective and a process towards improving the quality of people's lives in various societal dimensions – economic, social, environmental, cultural and political – and about how subjectively satisfied they are with it. Since 2015, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) reflect such consensus. The sections behind this argument are based on a review of (i) three key theoretical contributions to development and different phases of development thinking; (ii) global and regional governance arrangements and institutions for development cooperation; (iii) upcoming challenges to development policy and practice stemming from a series of new global challenges; and, (iv) development policy as a long and steady, increasingly global and participatory learning process.
Greening global governance
(2022)
The last decades have seen a remarkable expansion in the number of International Organizations (IOs) that have mainstreamed environmental issues into their policy scope—in many cases due to the pressure of civil society. We hypothesize that International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are in proximity to the headquarters of IOs, are more likely to affect IOs' expansion into the environmental domain. We test this explanation by utilizing a novel dataset on the strength of environmental global civil society in proximity to the headquarters of 76 IOs between 1950 and 2017. Three findings stand out. First, the more environmental INGOs have their secretariat in proximity to the headquarter of an IO, the more likely the IO mainstreams environmental policy. Second, proximate INGOs’ contribution increases when they can rely on domestically focused NGOs in member states. Third, a pathway case reveals that proximate INGOs played an essential role in inside lobbying, outside lobbying and information provision during the campaign to mainstream environmental issues at the World Bank. However, their efforts relied to a substantial extent on the work of local NGOs on the ground.
Sanctions are critical to the Security Council's efforts to fight terrorism. What is striking is that the Council's sanctions regimes are subject to detailed sets of rules and decision criteria. The scholarship on human rights in counterterrorism assumes that rights advocacy and court litigation have prompted this development. The article complements this literature by highlighting an unexplored internal driver of legal-regulatory decision-making and explores how mixed-motive interest constellations among Security Council members have affected the extent of committee regulations and the content of decisions taken by sanctions committees. Based on internal documents and diplomatic cables, a comparative analysis of the Iraq sanctions regime and the counterterrorism sanctions regime demonstrates that mixed-motive interest constellations among Security Council members provide incentives to elaborate rules to guide decision-making resulting in legal-regulatory sanctions governance, even if the human rights of targeted individuals are not at stake. For comparative leverage and to assess the limits of the proposed mechanism, the analysis is briefly extended to other sanctions regimes targeting individuals (Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan). The findings have implications for this essential tool of the Security Council to react to threats to peace as diverse as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, and internal armed conflict.
The article explores whether and to what extent expert recommendations affect decision-making within the Security Council and its North Korea and Iran sanctions regimes. The article first develops a rationalist theoretical argument to show why making many second-stage decisions, such as determining lists of items under export restrictions, subjects Security Council members to repeating coordination situations. Expert recommendations may provide focal point solutions to coordination problems, even when interests diverge and preferences remain stable. Empirically, the article first explores whether expert recommendations affected decision-making on commodity sanctions imposed on North Korea. Council members heavily relied on recommended export trigger lists as focal points, solving a divisive conflict among great powers. Second, the article explores whether expert recommendations affected the designation of sanctions violators in the Iran sanctions regime. Council members designated individuals and entities following expert recommendations as focal points, despite conflicting interests among great powers. The article concludes that expert recommendations are an additional means of influence in Security Council decision-making and seem relevant for second-stage decision-making among great powers in other international organisations.
This article examines public service resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic and studies the switch to telework due to social distancing measures. We argue that the pandemic and related policies led to increasing demands on public organisations and their employees. Following the job demands-resources model, we argue that resilience only can arise in the presence of resources for buffering these demands. Survey data were collected from 1,189 German public employees, 380 participants were included for analysis. The results suggest that the public service was resilient against the crisis and that the shift to telework was not as demanding as expected.
While school supervision structures in the German Länder were extensively reformed during the last decades, systematic analyses of these reforms are missing. This chapter contributes to this research gap by providing an overview of the implemented reforms of school supervision structures in the German Länder. The effects of these reforms are analysed in order to answer the question of whether a convergence of school supervision systems is a result of these reforms. In a first step, a distinction is made to identify system-changing reforms. Although a decrease of the number or a concentration on one school supervision system is not a result of the analysis, it is argued that there is a convergence of school supervision structures, as a clear trend against school supervision systems with lower school supervisory boards can be observed.