Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Advocacy is a crucial but overlooked source of change in international organizations. The advocacy-focused framework explains why some actors succeed at promoting change whereas others fail. The framework pairs advocacy strategies (social pressure, persuasion, and ‘authority talk’) with strategy-specific favourable conditions (characteristics of advocates, targets, issues, and context). The transformation of UN peacekeeping is an illustrative example of organizational change. Three elements of UN peacekeeping’s transformation are the focus of this book: strategic communications, protection of civilians, and quick impact projects. The three case studies exhibit variation in several important respects. First, they differ in salience, from the fundamental question of protection of human life to a seemingly technical issue of quick impact projects. Second, protection of civilians, strategic communications, and quick impact projects represent top-down, bottom-up, and outside-in pathways to change in international organizations: the top-down pathway entails issue construction in intergovernmental bodies, the bottom-up pathway is driven by experimentation by international bureaucrats, and the outside-in pathway relies on input from external actors. Third, the three issues emerged due to different advocacy strategies: persuasion in the case of strategic communications, social pressure and persuasion in the case of protection of civilians, and ‘authority talk’ in the case of quick impact projects. Finally, the three issues achieved varying degrees of institutionalization at different speeds. This book investigates their emergence through comparative process tracing based on archives, memoirs, UN policy and budgetary documents, and elite interviews.