Resourcing International Organisations: So What?

Abstract

The changes observed in resourcing international organisations over the last decades may have dramatic consequences for their ability to fulfil their mandates. This paper investigates into how far reaching the expected changes really are, and whether the new types and sources of financial and human resources can really be considered as causal for these developments. It appears that resourcing may not be the initial cause, but contributes to the centrifugal dynamics currently observed in the multilateral system. Administrative cost related to the new and complex funding structures are considerable, and ensuring transparency over resource flows represents a major challenge. Official decision-making bodies lose power to sub-groups of members or external actors that fund parts of the organisations' activities through separate channels. Given the large volume of non-core funding and the lack of transparency, they cannot easily adjust their own priorities. It can thus not be expected that the funding of certain activities through external channels will simply be compensated by a corresponding reduction of core funding in this area. Whether this negatively affects the ability of the organisations to fulfil their mandatesand hence, eventually their legitimacy -depends on the motivations of those actors empowered in this process. Policy Implications• The loss of trust in traditional international organisations on the one hand, and the tendency to provide them with resources through increasingly diverse channels outside their main budget on the other hand, is a mutually reinforcing process.• The use of these alternative channels leads to a substantial reduction of the power of formal decision-making bodies in these organisations, and to a redefinition of priorities that they cannot simply compensate by corresponding adjustments in their own budget.

Resourcing International Organizations: Resource Diversification, Organizational Differentiation, and Administrative Governance

“…In short, debates about resourcing IOs will continue. For scholars of IOs, it ‘pays’ to focus on resources (see also Michaelowa, ).…”

Global Governance

“…Earmarked funding promotes a piecemeal approach that limits flexibility and the ability to target funds where recipients believe they are needed most, and it generally restricts the ability to develop integrated approaches to support transformations (Weinlich et al 2020). Since donor organizations use the power of their purse to direct activities of multilateral organizations instead of seeking multilateral consensus, earmarked funding also undermines global governance and the legitimacy of multilateral organizations (Barder, Ritchie and Rogerson 2019;Graham 2017;Michaelowa 2017).…”

Comparative Fortunes of Ecosystem Services as an International Governance Concept

“…A second potential bureaucratic pressure is the shrinking of core budgets as donor states seek to exercise greater control over spending through earmarked contributions (Michaelowa, 2017). Earmarking funds for specific projects has increased rapidly in the UN system, and by 2012 accounted for 70 per cent of the contributions received by UN agencies (Graham, 2017).…”