International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

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.

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). 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 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). Today, the administrations of the UN system range from agency headquarters (HQs) in New York, Nairobi, Geneva or Vienna, to peacekeeping, humanitarian or development operations all across the globe, with total expenses reaching USD56 billion in 2019. ¹

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). The majority of UN staff work outside global HQs. Eckhard and Parízek (2020) counted 1674 UN system operations in 885 cities or towns in 2015, and in 2019, only 30% of staff in the official statistics were registered as working in HQs. HQ staff shares range from 100% in UN Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC’s) secretariat (see also Goritz et al., 2021), to 6% in the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and UN Migration Agency (IOM). Of the 70% of staff working outside HQs, over a fifth work within projects. In some agencies, project staff make up over 80% (UN Development Programme (UNDP)) or over 90% (IOM) of the total.

Past research on UN system bureaucracy

Since the path-breaking work of Barnett and Finnemore (2004), which focused on various UN system bureaucracies, the study of international bureaucracy and international public administration(s) has significantly advanced conceptually, theoretically and empirically (Bauer et al., 2017; see also Finnemore, 2021). Between 2004 and 2014, the number of academic publications with an explicit interest in international public administrations (IPAs) tripled as compared to the previous 40 years (Eckhard and Ege, 2016). International relations and public administration scholars increasingly join forces to study international bureaucracies (Fleischer and Reiners, 2021), resulting in more problem-driven and less discipline-specific research on IPAs (Ege et al., 2021b). A growing number of monographs compare multiple UN bureaucracies (Bayerlein et al., 2020; Eckhard and Jankauskas, forthcoming) or investigate the entire UN system (Patz and Goetz, 2019).

In IRAS, past research on UN system bureaucracies has addressed general management (Scheman, 1981), administrative models, culture and values (Beigbeder, 1997), administrative coordination (Ahmed, 1956; McLaren, 2001; Reymond, 1983), growth (Feld and Kilbourne, 1977), staffing (e.g. McLaren, 1996; Reymond, 1983) and leadership (Beigbeder, 1985). Most of these studies were mainly descriptive and focused on the core UN Secretariat rather than the diverse UN agencies or the different policy domains in which they are active. Only recently have UN bureaucracy studies turned to more policy-oriented research questions (Hickmann et al., 2019).

Advancing the public administration perspective on the UN system

This special issue advances current scholarship through a dedicated international public administration perspective on the UN system. Each article makes theoretical, conceptual, methodological and/or empirical contributions to studying UN system bureaucracies through research designs ranging from a single agency, to comparative, to systemwide.

Combining survey and process-tracing methods, Ege et al. (2021a) find bureaucratic influence in important decision-making processes of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Surveying national administrations in 80 countries on 15 UN system bureaucracies, the study by Busch et al. (2021) shows that the influence of these bureaucracies’ policy advice depends on how well it is tailored to member states’ policy concerns. In a third contribution on bureaucratic influence, Goritz, et al. (2021) combine survey and Twitter data in an inferential network analysis of the influence of the UNFCCC secretariat. All three articles discuss the limitations of measuring actual, attributed or inferred influence of international bureaucrats, inviting future research on the different dimensions of international organizations’ bureaucratic influence.

Two contributions use text-as-data methods to study linguistic aspects of bureaucratic speech-making in the UN General Assembly (Gray and Baturo, 2021) and the differentiated use of sentiment in the annual reporting of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021). Both contributions use bureaucratic language as the dependent variable, while leaving open the impact that language may have on the audience(s) of speeches and reports.

Based on a UN systemwide study of geographic representation of UN staff based on personnel statistics, Eckhard and Steinebach (2021) contribute to the debate about the politicization of staff in the UN. They show that indicators measuring bureaucratic merit in recruitment decisions can offer a stand-alone explanation of geographic representation. This raises questions of organizational procedures and potential for reform, which Grohs and Rasch (2021) trace in their study of organizational, budgeting and human resources reforms in the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the ILO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). They find that the four bureaucracies show many post-Weberian features, as well as convergence in reform dynamics across UN agencies.

Overall, the contributions in this special issue clearly demonstrate the growing diversity of research methods, including large-scale surveys (Busch et al., 2021), network analysis (Goritz et al., 2021), text as data (Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021) and mixed methods (Ege et al., 2021a), for studying UN bureaucracies as single or interrelated public administrations. There is growing interest in the relations between UN bureaucracies and diplomats or other national officials (Busch et al., 2021; Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021), as well as in dynamics that reveal inter-bureaucracy, systemwide or multilevel dynamics (Eckhard and Steinebach, 2021; Grohs and Rasch, 2021), and various studies also attempt to operationalize and measure bureaucratic influence. Future research on international bureaucracy and the UN system could combine these diverse efforts through increased interdisciplinary cooperation (Ege et al., 2021b; Fleischer and Reiners, 2021). One avenue of such research could be exploring and explaining the emergence of UN systemwide bureaucratic networks and influence dynamics.