Unboxing International Public Administrations: The Politics of Structural Change in the UN System (1998–2019)

• Author: Julia Fleischer,Aron Buzogány
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740221136488
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Unboxing International Public

Administrations: The Politics of Structural

Change in the UN System (1998–2019)

Julia Fleischer

1

and Aron Buzogány

2

Abstract

Recent debates in international relations increasingly focus on bureaucratic apparatuses of international organizations and

highlight their role, inf‌luence, and autonomy in global public policy. In this contribution we follow the recent call made by

Moloney and Rosenbloom in this journal to make use of “public administrative theory and empirically based knowledge in

analyzing the behavior of international and regional organizations”and offer a systematic analysis of the inner structures of

these administrative bodies. Changes in these structures can ref‌lect both the (re-)assignment of responsibilities, competencies,

and expertise, but also the (re)allocation of resources, staff, and corresponding signalling of priorities. Based on organizational

charts, we study structural changes within 46 international bureaucracies in the UN system. Tracing formal changes to all

internal units over two decades, this contribution provides the f‌irst longitudinal assessment of structural change at the inter-

national level. We demonstrate that the inner structures of international bureaucracies in the UN system became more frag-

mented over time but also experienced considerable volatility with periods of structural growth and retrenchment. The

analysis also suggests that IO’s political features yield stronger explanatory power for explaining these structural changes

than bureaucratic determinants. We conclude that the politics of structural change in international bureaucracies is a missing

piece in the current debate on international public administrations that complements existing research perspectives by reit-

erating the importance of the political context of international bureaucracies as actors in global governance.

Keywords

global public policy, international public administration, structural change

1. Introduction

Research on international organizations (IOs) has tradition-

ally been one of the core f‌ields of the international relations

(IR) literature. In the dominant neo-realist tradition of the

1980s, IOs were regarded as more or less institutionalized

arenas of state bargaining. This state-centric view focused

on capacities and preferences of states acting as unitary

actors and thus being the crucial determinants for IOs’effec-

tiveness. More recently, and as logical step following up the

studies understanding IOs as policy actors, this black box has

been opened up by constructivist IR and public administra-

tion (PA) researchers turning towards ’international bureau-

cracies’or ‘international public administrations’(IPAs) as

actors servicing and thereby shaping the preferences and pol-

icies of IOs (Moloney and Rosenbloom, 2020). Thus, the last

decade has been marked by the (re)discovery of bureaucracy in

IR and analyses of IO bureaucracies have increasingly achieved

a solid basis by relying empirically and theoretically on organi-

zation theory (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004; Bauer, 2006;

Dijkzeul & Beigbeder, 2003; Manulak, 2017). Analytically dis-

entangling IOs from their bureaucracies promises to provide a

comprehensive view on decision-making processes within IOs .

Nevertheless, the distinction between IOs and their bureau-

cratic corps was often downplayed in IR, so that it remained

unclear whether the IO activities referred to interactions

between member states within an IO or tasks executed by

international civil servants (Bauer & Weinlich, 2011).

Along this lines, research on international bureaucracies

has rediscovered early IO studies which referred to the role

of bureaucracies in IOs explicitly (Cox & Jacobson, 1973;

Weiss, 1982; Mouritzen, 1990) as well as in-depth empirical

case studies that –rather implicitly –scrutinized bureaucratic

actors in different IOs (Lipson, 2007). Recent studies follow

up this tradition by examining the politics of IO budgeting

and staff‌ing (Parízek, 2017; Patz & Goetz, 2019) or by

placing a stronger emphasis on the individual agency of top

1

University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

2

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

Corresponding Author:

Julia Fleischer, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Chair in German

Politics and Government, University of Potsdam, 14482 Potsdam, Germany.

Email: f‌leischer@uni-potsdam.de

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2023, Vol. 53(1) 23–35

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/02750740221136488

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