Change In International Organizations Research Articles

Advocacy and change in international organizations: communication, protection, and reconstruction in UN peacekeeping

Advocacy and change in international organizations: communication, protection, and reconstruction in UN peacekeeping

Kseniya Oksamytna. 2023. Advocacy and Change in International Organizations: Communication, Protection, and Reconstruction in UN Peacekeeping. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Kseniya Oksamytna. 2023. Advocacy and Change in International Organizations: Communication, Protection, and Reconstruction in UN Peacekeeping. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

“I BROKE FREE” Youth Activism and the Search for Rights for Children Born of War in Bosnia

The rise in recognition of children’s agency—that is, their status as inalienable right-bearing actors—has been a welcome change in international organizations, albeit often through a set of media activities that depict children variously as victims or beneficiaries of moral leadership. Typically, a handful of children/youth affected directly by a particular tragedy become the recognizable faces of identified human rights abuses. This research explores media representation of children born of war in Bosnia, “invisible” children who only recently were legally categorized as victims of war. As children who were born of wartime rape, the lives of select young activists have been documented through movies and media interviews since their childhood. This paper explores the costs of such disclosure and performativity, and sacrifices that young activists make to expose their “truth” to gain recognition of their attendant rights. It ultimately highlights the tension between the search for the rights of affected children and the dilemmas inherent in the actions of the few youth activists who publicly embrace the conditions of their birth to bring voice to others.

Internal Dynamics as Drivers of Change in International Organizations: The Economists’ Takeover at the World Bank

AbstractUsing the largely untapped episode of the reconstruction of the World Bank’s Economics Department in the mid-1960s, this article aims to augment our theoretical and empirical understanding of intra-organizational change in international organizations (IOs). By analyzing the instruments and mechanisms of dynamic staff agency, it highlights the capacity of norm entrepreneurs, professional groups, and internal administrative units to shape activities and initiate a change of IOs. The article makes a case for a more dynamic constructivist approach to the study of IOs and their ecosystems.

Discovering cooperation: Endogenous change in international organizations

Why do some international organizations (IO) accrete delegated authority over time while in others delegation is static or declines? We hypothesize that the dynamics of delegation are shaped by an IO’s founding contract. IOs rooted in an open-ended contract have the capacity to discover cooperation over time: as new problems arise these IOs can adopt new policies or strengthen collaboration in existing areas. This, in turn, triggers a demand for delegation. However, this logic is mediated by the political regime of the IO. In predominantly democratic IOs, delegation is constrained by politicization which intensifies as an IO’s policy portfolio broadens. These claims are tested using an updated version of the Measure of International Authority dataset covering 41 regional IOs between 1950 and 2019. Controlling for alternative explanations and addressing potential endogeneity across a range of model specifications, we find robust support for our argument.

Understanding Change in International Organizations Across Time and Spaces: The Rise of UN Country Teams

AbstractThis article analyses the progress of the agenda committed to tackle the fragmentation of the UN system to better understand the process of institutional change in International Organizations. Focusing on changes undergone by the UN's country‐level presence, the case study of the voluntary implementation of Delivering as One initiative (DaO) in Mozambique and Vietnam demonstrates how common plans, joint programs and pooled funds have promoted better divisions of labor and settled divergences among UN entities. This has fostered the national ownership of UN country‐level activities and developed the nexus of humanitarian‐development agendas. Pilot countries and donors resorted to selective incentives for the engagement of UN bureaucracies, who, especially at headquarters, remained resistant to reforms. Reform was subject to incentives and constraints that were introduced and manifested unevenly across spaces and over time. It lost momentum both in Mozambique and Vietnam following the pilot phase, when donors’ engagement faltered, but had more enduring effects in the latter, where the government’s greater capacity to engage in favor of reforms supported the compliance of UN country offices. This indicates the United Nations Country Teams (UNCT) consolidation amid institutional changes based on layering institutional innovations alongside extant structures, overcoming conflicts of loyalties.

Analogy-based collective decision-making and incremental change in international organizations

We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans.

Legitimacy and the Cognitive Sources of International Institutional Change: The Case of Regional Parliamentarization

AbstractHow and under what conditions does legitimacy affect processes of international institutional change? This article specifies and evaluates three causal mechanisms by which variation in legitimacy induces institutional change in international organizations (IOs) and argues that an important, yet hitherto neglected, source of legitimacy-based change is cognitive in nature. Using survival analysis, we evaluate these mechanisms with a novel dataset on the establishment of parliamentary institutions in thirty-six regional organizations between 1950 and 2010. We find that the empowerment of supranational secretariats, engagement with the European Union, and parliamentarization in an organization's neighborhood increase the likelihood of regional parliamentarization. This suggests that legitimacy judgments that draw on cognitive referents provide an important source of international institutional change. We illustrate the underlying cognitive emulation mechanism with a case study of parliamentarization in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

South-South Cooperation and Change in International Organizations

Using the examples of the UN Development Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, this article aims to analyze how the role of international organizations (IOs) is being changed through the incorporation of South-South cooperation (SSC) narratives and practices into their activities. Despite increased interest in the role of SSC in global governance, few empirical researchers get inside these organizations to see and analyze how this form of cooperation impacts IOs and how the latter adapt to these changes. Based on fieldwork and participant observation, the article presents some results on the mechanisms of IOs in their efforts to permanently readapt to the international environment and, at the same time, participate in the configuration of the international scene. The main argument is that the revival of SSC by rising powers has offered them an opportunity to establish individual and collective strategic partnerships with IOs. In doing so, these powers used SSC modalities to engage severa...

South-South Cooperation and Change in International Organizations

South-South Cooperation and Change in International Organizations

Individual Leadership in Guiding Change in Global Governance Institutions: Theory and Practice

It is increasingly accepted that in order for international organizations to address fully the panoply of threats and concerns at the international level the current structure of global governance, particularly the design of major international institutions, requires some level of reform. In different fields and at different levels, this reform has been discussed and debated, but has mostly stalled. Increasingly, it is the executive heads of an organization that are called upon to show stronger leadership during times of crisis and change. No longer viewed as merely managers or administrative posts, the leadership shown byexecutive heads of international organizations is now strongly linked with the effectiveness of these organizations. This working paper seeks to understand the role of leaders in driving, and responding to, change in international organizations. What does leadership, a term often used in relation to national politics, mean in the context of an international organization? How do leaders drive change within these bodies, and how do they effectively respond to external and internal challenges and threats? This paper argues that individual leaders, particularly during times of crisis, can play an important role in guiding change and reform. The first part discusses the concept of leadership in the context of international organizations, and discusses some of the ways in which executive heads can pursue change and reform in their organization. The second part turns to the specific example of the UN Secretary General, an executive head who, despite having a relatively minor role on paper, in some cases has been able to implement meaningful change in the organization. The paper argues that executive heads can and should show greater political leadership in reforming organizations and improving their effectiveness.

Institutional change and continuity in the European Union: The super-commissioner saga

We analyse the politics surrounding the proposal to create a super-commissioner with exclusive powers to veto national budgets in the European Union (EU). According to liberal institutionalism and liberal inter-governmentalism, there should be no need for a super-commissioner to enforce inter-governmental agreements, because the European Commission (the Commission) is already doing this. So, is the super-commissioner superfluous, or is the theory wrong? To answer this question, we build an analytic narrative aimed at clarifying who wanted what and why, and at explaining how a relatively small coalition of northern creditor-nation governments almost succeeded in amending the EU’s core constitutional principle of executive-level collegiality by threatening to select an altogether different institution. Our findings bear significance not only for current policy debates, but also for our appreciation of the institutional equilibria that sustain the EU, and on the theory of institutional change in international organizations.

International organizations and organizational fields: explaining policy change in the IMF

The purpose of this paper is to account for varieties of organizational change. In particular, we contend that in order to explain change in international organizations (IOs) we cannot simply dichotomize between change and the lack thereof. Rather, change is best conceptualized as made up of two dimensions: speed and scope. The combination of the two dimensions leads to a taxonomy with four distinct types of policy change. The paper evaluates the emergence of different types of change by focusing on the relationship between IOs and their fields. Specifically, the position of the organization in the field helps to account for the speed of change (slow vs. rapid), whereas the openness of the organization to the inputs coming from the field helps to explain the scope of change (incremental vs. radical). We illustrate our argument by comparing the changes in the International Monetary Fund's policies in the areas of financial sector surveillance and poverty reduction.

The International Energy Agency after 35 years: Reform needs and institutional adaptability

Despite the mounting scholarly interest in processes of institutional change in international organizations, still very little is known about how and when such evolutionary dynamics occur. This article hopes to contribute to this young, yet growing body of literature by process-tracing the changes that have occurred in the institutional setup of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Founded during the first oil crisis of 1973–74, the IEA has had to deal with major environmental changes over its lifetime. In response, the agency has diversified away from its original raison d’etre, namely managing an emergency oil sharing mechanism, to become a more proactive policy adviser guiding its member governments toward sustainable energy economies. The article seeks to explain the observed patterns of change and inertia, using a theoretic paradigm that builds on theories of “new institutionalism.” The paper argues that the agency’s institutional flexibility can only be fully explained by taking into account a combination of factors: (1) the member states’ choices, in particular the impulses of the G8-members of the IEA; (2) path dependency, especially the institutional link with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); and (3) agency by the secretariat and the executive bureau of the IEA.

Economic Growth, Poverty Reduction, and the Role of Social Policies: The Evolution of the World Bank’s Social Development Approach

The World Bank has undergone tremendous change recently. One crucial innovation is its initiative to raise social development to the level of core issue within its development strategy. While the Bank has always been concerned with social issues, the meaning and operational significance of social has changed over time. Using a content analysis of relevant World Bank documents, I distinguish three periods where the meaning of social has changed. The article's main objective is to explain this change in the Bank, allowing us to answer questions about the conditions for policy change in international organizations. Is the World Bank merely adapting to the outside world, or is it engaging in innovative behavior? The case study reveals an alternative explanation for policy change in IOs other than either external pressure or internal advocacy. It shows that external and internal triggers are related and reinforce each other. Keywords: World Bank, development strategy, internal advocates, international organizations, discursive change. he World Bank has undergone tremendous change during the past decade.1 One crucial innovation is its initiative to raise social develop I ment to the level of core issue within its development strategy, as reflected in its 2005 social development strategy.2 While there had never been a Bankwide approach to social development before, the Bank has always been concerned with social issues. However, the meaning and operational signifi cance of the social has changed over time. Once at the core of the development strategy in the late 1970s, social policies seemed to be forgotten over the course of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, social policies were transformed into facilitators of economic growth in order to reduce poverty, before finally returning to become the core of development today. Social policies have always been closely tied to the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction and thus to the Bank's development strategy. The role of social (development) policies within the economic growth and poverty reduction nexus has shifted according to the World Bank's understanding of development at different times. I argue that the Bank's discourse on the social

Designing Police: Interpol and the Study of Change in International Organizations

On those rare occasions when scholars of international organizations (IOs) consider the issue of change, they typically highlight the centrality of states. Although states are important for understanding when and why there is a change in the tasks, mandate, and design of IO, IOs themselves can initiate change. Drawing from sociological institutional and resource dependence approaches, in this article we treat IOs as strategic actors that can choose among a set of strategies in order to pursue their goals in response to changing environmental pressures and constraints that potentially threaten their relevance and resource base. We delineate six strategies—acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, defiance, manipulation, and strategic social construction, and suggest that the strategic choice by IOs is contingent on the level of both organizational insecurity and the congruence between the content of environmental pressures and organizational culture. We emphasize how IOs must make a trade-off between acquiring the resources necessary to survive and be secure, on the one hand, and maintaining autonomy, on the other. We apply this framework to the case of Interpol, investigating how different calculations of these trade-offs led Interpol staff to adopt different strategies depending on its willingness to accept, resist, or initiate changes that demand conformity to external pressures.

THE CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Presents the results of a survey on international organizational change at Ashridge′s recent “2001: A Research Odyssey” Conference.

When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations.

When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations.

When Knowledge Is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations. By Ernst B. Haas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 274p. $29.95.

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When knowledge is power: three models of change in international organizations

Do governments seeking to collaborate in such international organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank ever learn to improve the performance of those organizations? Can international organizations be improved by a deliberate institutional design that reflects lessons learned in peacekeeping, the protection of human rights, and environmentally sound economic development? In this incisive work, Ernst Haas examines these and other issues to delineate the conditions under which organizations change their methods for defining problems. Haas contends that international organizations change most effectively when they are able to redefine the causes underlying the problems to be addressed. He shows that such self-reflection is possible when the expert-generated knowledge about the problems can be made to mesh with the interests of hegemonic coalitions of member governments. But usually efforts to change organizations begin as adaptive practices that owe little to a systematic questioning of past behavior. Often organizations adapt and survive without fully satisfying most of their members, as has been the case with the United Nations since 1970. When Knowledge Is Power is a wide-ranging work that will elicit interest from political scientists, organization theorists, bureaucrats, and students of management and international administration.