Exploring the hidden influence of international treaty secretariats: using social network analysis to analyse the Twitter debate on the ‘Lima Work Programme on Gender’

International bureaucracies, also called International Public Administrations (IPAs), have been identified as potentially influential actors within the global climate change regime complex. To assess how these organizations exert influence, scholars have predominantly relied on case studies, interviews and descriptive (network) statistics. This article aims to contribute to this literature with a systematic analysis that is not limited to an organization, issue or region, but applies exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to data from an original large-N survey (n = 342) of participants of global climate negotiations. Our findings indicate that IPAs have a considerable potential to influence global climate policy outputs. This potential influence is associated with the information they provide to regime stakeholders.

The article investigates how international public administrations, as corporate actors, influence policymaking within international organizations. Starting from a conception of international organizations as political-administrative systems, we theorize the strategies international bureaucrats may use to affect international organizations’ policies and the conditions under which these strategies vary. Building on a most-likely case design, we use process tracing to study two cases of bureaucratic influence: the influence of the secretariat of the World Health Organization on the “Global action plan for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases”; and the influence of the International Labour Office on the “Resolution concerning decent work in global supply chains”. We use interview material gathered from international public administration staff and stakeholders to illustrate varying influence strategies and the conditions under which these strategies are used. The study shows how and when international public administrations exert policy influence, and offers new opportunities to extend the generalizability of public administration theories. Points for practitioners International bureaucrats influence the outcomes of multilateral negotiations by means of their technical expertise and strategic involvement in the decision-making process. Their influence is primarily geared toward achieving organizational goals. However, the perception of too much influence can threaten the implementation of a decision. Political leadership needs to find the right balance between encouraging entrepreneurial behavior and providing sufficient political steering. Civil servants themselves need a well-functioning political radar to sense how far they can push with their ambitions.

International organizations and their secretariats, called international public administrations (IPAs), have been found to hold considerable authority in world politics. This study conceptualizes and measures IPA authority in the digital sphere. It proposes the concept of digital authority to measure the authority of actors in online social networks (OSN), such as Twitter. Applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs) based on Twitter data during climate change negotiations the article compares the authority of IPAs to that of other actors. The findings show that IPAs are attributed as much authority as state actors in global climate communication networks on Twitter.

This chapter argues that SNA provides a promising method for assessing the political influence of IPAs. While there is little doubt that international public administrations (IPAs) exert autonomous influence on international policy outputs, scholars struggle with the problem of how to measure this influence. Established methods for assessing political influence are of limited use when focusing on IPAs. The “hidden” character of potential IPA influence is strongest for international treaty secretariats. Treaty secretariats are issue-specific administrations that focus on single-policy problems rather than entire policy areas. The changing role of international environmental treaty secretariats is also reflected in new concepts of IPAs as orchestrators or as attention-seeking bureaucracies. Data were collected between September 2015 and March 2016, approaching a wide variety of state and non-state actors operating at different levels of the global environmental policy domain via a large-N survey of organizations in the field of global climate governance.

Recent debates in international relations increasingly focus on bureaucratic apparatuses of international organizations and highlight their role, influence, and autonomy in global public policy. In this contribution we follow the recent call made by Moloney and Rosenbloom in this journal to make use of “public administrative theory and empirically based knowledge in analyzing the behavior of international and regional organizations” and offer a systematic analysis of the inner structures of these administrative bodies. Changes in these structures can reflect both the (re-)assignment of responsibilities, competencies, and expertise, but also the (re)allocation of resources, staff, and corresponding signalling of priorities. Based on organizational charts, we study structural changes within 46 international bureaucracies in the UN system. Tracing formal changes to all internal units over two decades, this contribution provides the first longitudinal assessment of structural change at the international level. We demonstrate that the inner structures of international bureaucracies in the UN system became more fragmented over time but also experienced considerable volatility with periods of structural growth and retrenchment. The analysis also suggests that IO's political features yield stronger explanatory power for explaining these structural changes than bureaucratic determinants. We conclude that the politics of structural change in international bureaucracies is a missing piece in the current debate on international public administrations that complements existing research perspectives by reiterating the importance of the political context of international bureaucracies as actors in global governance.

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.

This study investigates how configurations of bureaucratic autonomy, policy complexity and political contestation allow international public administrations (IPAs) to influence policymaking within international organizations. A fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 17 policy decisions in four organizations (FAO, WHO, ILO, UNESCO) shows that all IPAs studied can be influential in favorable contexts. When policies are both contested and complex, even IPAs lacking autonomy can influence policy. If either complexity or contestation is absent, however, it is the variant of autonomy of will that helps the IPA exploit procedural strategies of influence. Low autonomy of will, among other factors, explains why IPAs cannot exert influence. Conversely, the variant of autonomy of action appears largely irrelevant. The study provides new insights into the role of bureaucracy beyond the state, exemplifying how research of bureaucratic influence can yield more systematic results in various empirical settings.

How does budgeting work for international organizations within the United Nations system? What role do states as complex principals and international bureaucracies as complex agents play within budgeting processes? By providing four case studies on the UN, ILO, UNESCO, and WHO, the authors of “Managing Money and Discord in the UN – Budgeting and Bureaucracy” offer valuable insights on budgeting and its procedures in the UN System of organizations. Their findings demonstrate that despite global financial crisis and significant structural changes in global politics, the core budget routines of international organizations have remained relatively stable over the past decades. However, with vested interests of powerful member states, complementary financial arrangements outside the core organizations, diverging intraorganizational priorities, or the rise of philanthropy and voluntary contributions, complexities for both principals and agents have increased, which ultimately put the capacity of international bureaucracies to maintain budgetary routines at risk. By bridging the gap between related, but distinct disciplines within political science, the concept of budgeting put forward in this book is equally important for the study of International Relations, International Public Administrations, Political Economy, and Public Policy.

Policy-making beyond the nation-state takes place in complex settings. It involves multiple institutional actors and levels that jointly produce and sustain political authority. In this context, the establishment and rise of international organizations and their bureaucratic bodies, the international public administrations (IPAs), have increasingly been considered as a reflection of an ongoing transfer of political authority from the domestic to the international level. Macro- and micro-assessments of IPA influence are complemented by contributions that take the meso-level of organizational characteristics as the analytical point of departure. In addition to conventional methods, such as process tracing and quantitative analysis, the contributions rely partially on recent methodological innovations that so far have not been exploited for the study of IPAs, such as stakeholder survey, social network analysis, and topic modeling. The chapter argues that looking at IPAs from a dynamic policy perspective might provide space for new insights on policy-making beyond the nation-state.

Combining theoretical and empirical approaches, this book examines the role that international public administrations play in global environmental politics in the Anthropocene. With chapters written by leading experts in the field, this text offers fresh insight into how international bureaucracies shape global policies in the complex areas of climate change, biodiversity, and development policy. International public administrations are thus recognized as partially autonomous actors with their own interests and motivations, assuming the roles of managers, orchestrators, brokers, or attention-seekers. This comprehensive resource provides scholars and practitioners with valuable insight into environmental policymaking and how international public administrations might be transformed to better address the multiple, fundamental challenges of our century. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

International public administrations (IPAs) have become an essential feature of global governance, contributing to what some have described as the 'bureaucratization of world politics'. While we do know that IPAs matter for international politics, we neither know exactly to what extent nor how exactly they matter for international organizations' policy making processes and subsequent outputs. This book provides an innovative perspective on IPAs and their agency in introducing the concept of administrative styles to the study of international organizations and global public policy. It argues that the administrative bodies of international organizations can develop informal working routines that allow them to exert influence beyond their formal autonomy and mandate. The theoretical argument is tested by an encompassing comparative assessment of administrative styles and their determinants across eight IPAs providing rich empirical insight gathered in more than 100 expert interviews

The article addresses an issue that has received little attention in the literature on representative bureaucracy, namely the relationship between representativeness and specialized expertise in public administration. While representation may strengthen the legitimacy of public bureaucracies, what implications does it have for expert knowledge in these organizations? This issue is examined by looking at the recruitment of civil servants to the European Commission, an international bureaucracy where the question of geographical representation is of fundamental importance. Based on a quantitative analysis of nearly 200 recruitment competitions for the organization from 1958 to 2015, the article finds that competitions related to EU enlargement where nationality was an explicit criterion put significantly less emphasis on specialist qualifications and knowledge than other competitions. This indicates a negative relationship between geographical representation and specialized expertise in recruitment to the European Commission. Implications for broader debates about representative bureaucracy and international public administrations are discussed.

Voluntary contributions – often earmarked for specific purposes – have become an indispensable source of revenue for international organizations (IOs) and the UN organizations in particular. While the reasons for this trend are regularly studied, its effects on the internal functioning of the organization (especially on the ‘international public administration’ (IPA) as the organization's secretariat) remain unclear. Given this gap, we study the consequences of increasing financial dependence for the autonomy of IPA staff. Using financial and personnel data of 15 UN agencies over time, our results are in line with the intuitive expectation that more financial resources in the form of voluntary contributions increase the number of staff. We also find evidence, however, that the more an organization depends on voluntary resources (within its broader financial portfolio), the more it reduces the ratio of permanent staff among its total workforce in the subsequent years. The underlying adaption of IPAs’ recruitment and career structures to growing financial insecurities has important implications for the autonomy of international bureaucrats and needs to be considered also in terms of its long‐term impact on administrative professionalism and organizational performance.

Conceptualizing international public administrations (IPAs) as attention-seeking bureaucracies which aim to actively feed their policy-relevant information into multilateral decision-making process, the chapter proposes two pathways through which international treaty secretariats may seek to influence international negotiations: (a) secretariats may attempt to supply policy-relevant information to negotiators from the inside via their close cooperation with the chairs of multilateral negotiations; (b) they may attempt to build support for their preferred policy outputs by engaging with and communicatively connecting actors within the broader transnational policy network in order to exert pressure on negotiators from the outside. Taking the secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) as an example, these potential pathways of secretariat influence are illustrated and explored empirically. The findings contribute to a growing body of literature that studies the role of national and IPAs as agenda-setters, policy entrepreneurs, or policy brokers at the interface of public policy analysis and PA.