International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir,Steffen Eckhard,Ronny Patz

doi:10.1177/00208523211038730

Abstract

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.

Highlights

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
While this system has long been seen as originating in post-Second World War multilateralism, an increasing body of literature traces the roots of the United Nations (UN) civil service back to the League of Nations (Gram-Skjoldager et al, 2020), the first ‘great experiment in international administration’ (Ranshofen-Wertheimer, 1945), or even earlier (Reinalda, 2020)
In terms of staff size, the UN system surpasses the European Union’s (EU’s) supranational administration, with official UN staff statistics reporting a total of 114,119 UN system officials at the end of 2019 in 38 different UN system agencies (UNSCEB, 2020)

Summary

The United Nations as a system of international bureaucracies

The administrative size and scope of the United Nations (UN) system is often overlooked in both public administration and UN scholarship (Elmandjra, 1973). In terms of staff size, the UN system surpasses the European Union’s (EU’s) supranational administration (see the 2012 IRAS special issue edited by Ongaro, e.g., Ongaro, 2012), with official UN staff statistics reporting a total of 114,119 UN system officials at the end of 2019 in 38 different UN system agencies (UNSCEB, 2020). These data exclude many short-term staff (less than one year), consultants and around 30,000 street-level staff working for the UN’s Palestine refugee agency (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021). Project staff make up over 80% (UN Development Programme (UNDP)) or over 90% (IOM) of the total

Past research on UN system bureaucracy

Findings

Advancing the public administration perspective on the UN system