Cross‐level coordination among international organizations: Dilemmas and practices

Abstract

This article contributes to the understanding of inter‐agency coordination among international organizations, conceived as international public administrations (IPAs). We adopt a practice‐based approach to study the dilemmas of coordination across levels of government in the empirical setting of United Nations agencies involved in field‐level development activities. Based on elite interviews in both pilot countries and agency headquarters, complemented by extensive archival analysis, we track the emergence of a specific type of coordination dilemma that has been understudied, that is, the dilemma of inter‐ and intra‐agency coordination. We identify two sets of coordinating practices that aided in balancing the dilemma, that is, ‘systemic thinking’ and ‘jointly mobilizing resources and consensus’, and we discuss the organizational factors mediating the perception of each set of practices.

The organisational dimension of executive authority in the Global South: Insights from the AU and ECOWAS commissions

“…This suggests prima facie that respondents are more than only organisational managers and coordinators and that they assume autonomous policy‐making roles and tasks within their respective organisations. The data thus subscribe to the thrust of extant literature on Western IPAs exhibiting significant policy‐making roles for IPA staff (Bauer et al, 2019; Eckhard & Parizek, 2022; Mele & Cappellaro, 2018; Trondal et al, 2010, 2018). Next, compatible with an organisational approach, IPA staff are generally preoccupied with internal tasks over external ones.…”

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

“…In the second cycle of common plans, diminishing pool funds led to the disengagement of agencies, which advocated for common programming instead of JP, repositioning the focus from the coordination of activities to that of policies. Against this background, the practices that were developed to characterize UN entities as a team lost impetus (Mele and Cappellaro, 2018), especially in Mozambique, where there was no national governance attached to a centralized administration that held line ministries and UN agencies accountable as in the Vietnam's Detail Project Outlines model. This context also intensified entrenched resistance from headquarters, since fragmentation drivers, such as their divided institutional structures and the decentralized funding of UN agencies, remained.…”

Avoiding disciplinary garbage cans: a pledge for a problem-driven approach to researching international public administration

“…For decades, governments have contributed to the creation of multiple institutional islands or 'national fiefdoms' (Kleine, 2013) within IOs, by providing extra budgetary funding for pet-activities while circumventing IOs' collective decision structures (Patz & Goetz, 2019). This has put IPAs on a slippery slope towards more institutional fragmentation and a stronger need for coordinationbe it between different organizations (Mele & Cappellaro, 2018), within a single IPA (Graham, 2014) or between headquarters and regional branches (Hanrieder, 2015) and implementing field offices (Eckhard, 2016). Even in the face of major crises, member states seem unable to agree on a reform that cuts back on IPA activities to streamline the organization, because they are unable to find a compromise that hurts each government party equally (Eckhard et al, 2019).…”