International

Review of
Administrative
Article Sciences

International Review of Administrative

Sciences
Lessons from public 2021, Vol. 87(4) 831–835
© The Author(s) 2021
administration for global Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
governance DOI: 10.1177/00208523211038825
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras

Conclusions of the special issue on

“International Bureaucracy and
the United Nations System.”

Martha Finnemore
George Washington University

Keywords
international administration, international organizations (IGOs)

The role of international bureaucracies in providing governance in the 21st century is

expanding. Not only is the United Nations (UN) bureaucracy large and growing (see intro-
duction to this volume by Thorvaldsdottir et al., 2021), but international organizations of
diverse kinds beyond the UN are actively crafting policies, practices, and rules that govern
international life in almost every sphere of activity (Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014).
Understanding the power, procedures, and effects of these international public administra-
tions (IPAs) will be essential and, as the papers here demonstrate, a public administration
(PA) perspective can shine light on crucial issues that both policymakers and scholars in
other fields (political science, economics, sociology) might miss. In what follows I do two
things. First, I highlight findings from these papers that may surprise and intrigue scholars
in other fields, particularly my own (international relations (IR)), and I highlight what PA
scholars are bringing to the broader interdisciplinary conversation. Second, I draw out
implications of these findings for broader issues under discussion among global govern-
ance scholars elsewhere that PA might fruitfully consider.
Public administration scholars bring both a conceptual sensibility and a diverse meth-
odological toolkit to the study of IPAs that are welcome. Other disciplines often

Corresponding author:
Martha Finnemore, George Washington University, 2115 G Street NW, Washington 20052-0086, USA.
Email: fi[email protected]
832 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(4)

foreground nation states or markets as primary units of analytic concern and treat inter-
national organizations (or IPAs) as side-shows. PA scholars, by contrast, focus on bur-
eaucracies themselves. Their primary concerns are not power or wealth or efficiency
but bureaucratic characteristics: bureaucratic autonomy, administrative styles, bureau-
cratic entrepreneurship, administrative expertise, bureaucratic budget-making, and
administrative coordination (Bauer et al., 2017: 7–9). This leads PA scholars to ask dis-
tinctive research questions. Whereas IR scholars in political science have focused on
“international cooperation,” mostly among states, and have treated IPAs as epiphenom-
enal means to that end, PA scholars often start with the IPAs themselves and ask about
cooperation and coordination within and among these organizations.
Taking organizations, themselves, as the analytic starting point steers public adminis-
tration research in directions other disciplines might neglect. For example, many scholars
are interested in expertise and its role in IPAs (Littoz-Monnet, 2017), but, as the papers
here demonstrate, PA scholars widen our aperture on what kinds of expertise might be
relevant to IPA behavior and policy outcomes. In IR and elsewhere, the “expertise”
deployed by IPAs is usually understood as substantive knowledge about policy issues
—technical knowledge about science, the environment, finance, health, and other
issues. But Ege et al. (2021) show how expertise in bureaucratic processes (what they
call “process expertise”) can be an important source of power for IPA staff. Knowing
how things are done inside bureaucracies can allow staff to shape agendas, frame
issues, and influence committee chairs in entrepreneurial and consequential ways. Such
procedural interventions are often subtle, which has the added benefit of maintaining a
legitimating face of impartiality on IPA staff actions. Political scientists have identified
the importance of impartiality for international organizations (Barnett and Finnemore,
2004), but the PA perspective helps us understand better how impartiality can be accom-
plished in organizational terms (Heinzel et al., 2020).
Similarly, characteristics and career incentives of individual staff within IPAs can be
varied which, in turn, creates varied behavior. Few IR analyses drill down into details of
bureaucratic staffing. They are more likely to assume staff are uniformly rational indivi-
duals who will respond uniformly to either formal IPA rules or informal cultural norms.
Gray and Baturo’s (2021) findings challenge this. They show that one type of staff (per-
manent delegates to IPAs) are socialized as international diplomats who talk and act dif-
ferently from political delegates drawn from national political systems by their
governments. Their findings raise questions, not just for other disciplines, but for the
other authors in this issue. One wonders, for example, whether the distribution of perma-
nent versus political delegates in an IPA affects the “local tailoring” of policy advice IPAs
give (Busch et al., 2021) or whether permanent versus political delegates use Twitter dif-
ferently (Goritz et al., 2021). Foreign policy analysis in political science sometimes
explores bureaucratic staffing and behavior. Those scholars would be interested in
Goritz et al.’s (2021) observations about the way staff use online social networks like
Twitter as individuals rather than as inhabitants of their bureaucratic role or representa-
tives of the collective IPA.
A PA perspective can also generate findings that may challenge conventional wisdom
held elsewhere in the policy world and among scholars. Stakeholders across many
Finnemore 833

international organizations have long complained that international bureaucracies are

too detached from the citizens they serve. IPAs are said to privilege Western knowledge
and values over local knowledge and values. A range of scholarly work has offered
support to this view and explored its implications. However, the PA analyses presented
here should cause reexamination of this view. Eckhard and Steinbach’s (2021) finding
that IPAs emphasize local knowledge and work experience in hiring practices
rather than (often Western) formal education credentials will surprise many scholars
who would expect a contrary result. The finding could be good news for reform-minded
civil society groups, however, as it suggests that IPAs actually learn and listen to
stakeholders. Busch et al.’s (2021) findings suggest a similar pattern. They argue that
IPAs who tailor their advice to local contexts get better uptake of that advice.
Resisting tendencies toward universal “one-size-fits-all” advice can pay off for IPAs,
in their analysis. As earlier scholarly work and much policy criticism has emphasized
the one-size-fits-all behavior as a common failing of IPAs, the finding will be a pleasant
surprise to many.
These happy findings beg questions, however. Focusing on structural features of IPAs,
as the PA perspective does, should not (and need not) obscure important normative fea-
tures of IPA policies and governance. Many of these revolve around accountability. To
whom, exactly, are IPAs accountable? Whose interests should they serve? Many
principal–agent analyses in IR and economics assume that international bureaucracies
such as those in the UN system are accountable to states. States, after all, are the
formal “principals” of these UN IPAs. But the IPA scholars here clearly have a
broader view. Many of the papers discuss “stakeholders” broadly as an audience for
IPAs and are aware that IPAs must serve more audiences than just states. Indeed,
Thorvaldsdottir and Patz (2021) show us that IPAs are very much attuned to diverse audi-
ences for their annual reports, and that IPAs strategize about how they present their work,
adjusting strategies to context. But the Grohs and Rasch (2021) findings suggest that IPA
reforms, including those around accountability and transparency, may be driven by intel-
lectual fashions; internal factors rather than external pressure from stakeholders may
drive IPA changes. None of the papers in this issue has much to say about whether
IPA governance or reforms actually create benefits or, importantly, harms for stake-
holders and whether (or how) one could assess this.
The subtext in Busch et al. (2021) seems to be that uptake of an IPA’s advice by
national-level policymakers is a good thing. From one perspective it surely is. IPAs
whose advice is ignored are not effective by most measures. But how should tailoring
to local context be done when the IPA’s expert advice will be politically unpopular,
even resisted, at the national level? Budget-cutting, common advice from the interna-
tional financial institutions (IMF and World Bank), is rarely popular. In politically
fragile situations, implementing unpopular measures (cutting food or fuel subsidies)
could be politically damaging for the “client” government and can harm citizens. How
should “tailoring” of advice be done in situations where the IPA’s expertise demands
action of clients that will be politically destabilizing or harmful? What about situations
in which the national government is corrupt and/or repressive? Should an IPA be tailoring
its research to serve such a government?
834 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(4)

Like most good research, the papers here are seminal, not definitive. They open new
lines of research for scholars interested in global governance and pose questions that
deserve good answers. Many of these questions speak to PA’s core concepts. How do
characteristics of IPA staffing create different patterns of IPA behavior? When and
why do IPAs undertake reform efforts? Do IPAs learn new lessons and behaviors? If
so, under what conditions and from whom? More research on these and other questions
will help us better understand the many IPAs providing global governance today.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Martha Finnemore https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6828-1641

References
Barnett M and Finnemore M (2004) Rules for the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bauer MW, Knill C and Eckhard S (2017) International Bureaucracy: Challenges and Lessons for
Public Administration Research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Busch PO, Feil H, Heinzel M, et al. (2021) Policy recommendations of international bureaucracies:
The importance of country-specificity. International Review of Administrative Sciences. 87(4).
DOI: 00208523211013385.
Eckhard S and Steinebach Y (2021) A matter of merit or nationality? Staff recruitment and geo-
graphical representation in international organizations. International Review of Administrative
Sciences. Epub ahead of print 20 July 2021. 87(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211031379.
Ege J, Bauer MW and Wagner N (2021) How do international bureaucrats affect policy outputs?
Studying administrative influence strategies in international organizations. International
Review of Administrative Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 00208523211000109.
Goritz A, Jörgens H and Kolleck N (2021) Interconnected bureaucracies? Comparing online and
offline networks during global climate negotiations. International Review of Administrative
Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 00208523211022823.
Gray J and Baturo A (2021) Delegating diplomacy: Rhetoric across agents in the United Nations
General Assembly. International Review of Administrative Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 002085232
1997560.
Grohs S and Rasch D (2021) Administrative convergence in the United Nations system? Patterns of
administrative reform in four United Nations organizations over time. International Review of
Administrative Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 00208523211018781.
Heinzel M, Richter J, Busch PO, et al. (2020) Birds of a feather? The determinants of impartiality
perceptions of the IMF and the World Bank. Review of International Political Economy. 1–25.
DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2020.1749711.
Finnemore 835

Littoz-Monnet A (ed.) (2017) The Politics of Expertise in International Organizations: How

International Bureaucracies Produce and Mobilize Knowledge. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge.
Thorvaldsdottir S and Patz R (2021) Explaining sentiment shifts in UN system annual reporting: A
longitudinal comparison of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM. International Review of
Administrative Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 00208523211029804.
Thorvaldsdottir S, Patz R and Eckhard S (2021) International bureaucracy and the United Nations
system. International Review of Administrative Sciences. 87(4). DOI: 10.1177/0020852321
1038730.
Weiss TG and Wilkinson R (2014) Rethinking global governance? Complexity, authority, power,
change. International Studies Quarterly 58(1): 207–215.

Martha Finnemore is University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on global
governance, international organizations, cybersecurity, ethics, and social theory. She is
a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a non-resident scholar at
the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She
has been a visiting research fellow at the Brookings Institution and Stanford
University, and has received fellowships or grants from the MacArthur Foundation,
the Social Science Research Council, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the
United States Institute of Peace.