Comparing the autonomy of international public administrations: An ideal‐type approach

Abstract

International Public Administrations (IPAs), that is, the secretariats of international organizations, are important actors in global governance. This article develops a new typology of IPAs that captures the potential influence of these bureaucratic bodies on international policy‐making. The main argument is that when conceptualizing the varying roles and potential policy impact of IPAs, it is useful to distinguish between their ability to develop autonomous preferences (autonomy of will) on the one hand, and their capacity to transform these preferences into action (autonomy of action) on the other. Based on this premise, the article introduces four distinct ideal‐types of international bureaucracies and suggests indicators to locate a diverse sample of 20 administrations within the four‐fold typology. The results reveal the empirical diversity of IPA autonomy and allow for a first empirical assessment of the factors behind this pattern.

The politics of evaluation in international organizations: A comparative study of stakeholder influence potential

“…To the extent that IPA-controlled evaluation enters the process, either ex ante to confirm regulatory need or ex post to allow adjustment or termination, policies could also be influenced along the lines of IPA interests. Such a finding would be in line with IO studies depicting IPAs as autonomous policymaking entrepreneurs Eckhard and Ege, 2016;Ege, 2017;Knill et al, 2016Knill et al, , 2018 as well as studies highlighting in domestic settings the influence of bureaucrats over evaluators (Bjornholt and Larsen, 2014;Leeuw and Furubo, 2008;Weiss, 1993).…”

Cross‐level coordination among international organizations: Dilemmas and practices

“…Meanwhile, practices aimed at the ‘joint mobilization of resources and consensus’ appear to be more salient for agencies with a politically sensitive mandate and for those with a strong brand. The identification of specific organizational factors related to the modus operandi of individual agencies (i.e., geographical deployment and size of the agency), the characteristics of their mandate (i.e., highly specialized and politically sensitive) and the strength of their brand provide additional ammunition to the strand of research concerned with the organizational features and administrative structures that confer an autonomous agentic power to international bureaucracies (Bauer and Ege ; Trondal ; Ege ). In particular, the influence of the brand strength of specific agencies on how those agencies perceive coordinating practices resonates with the relevance of reputation in previous studies of cooperative arrangements at the European level (Busuioc ).…”

“…The notion of international public administration (IPA) suggests precisely that complex intergovernmental settings are amenable to being investigated through the lenses developed for the study of national bureaucracies (Trondal ; Trondal et al ; Baccaro and Mele ; Ansell et al ; Bauer et al ). By applying these lenses, scholars have explored the actual autonomy of IOs (Bauer and Ege ; Ege ), especially by bringing organizational structure and ways of organizing back into IO studies (Trondal ) and by attending to their effects on the actions, role perceptions and loyalties of international civil servants (Mele et al ). In this vein, international organizations have been conceptualized as complex and compound bureaucracies characterized by the coexistence of different logics, ranging from an epistemic to a supranational one.…”

The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund

“…Future research could further unpack the politics that lead to the selection of the expertise of some actors while excluding that of others. Particularly fruitful in this regard would be to compare the role of the usual suspects (principals, senior staff), the weight of neglected actors such as internal secretariats (Ege ) and forms of club governance (Tsingou ).…”