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

Campos, Luciana Aparecida

doi:10.1111/1758-5899.13018

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Worrall (this special issue) explores the influences of temporal and spatial practices upon the functioning of IOs in the Middle East, questioning the roles of time and space as contextual elements, their impact on the internal structures and bureaucrats, as well as on their surroundings. Campos (this special issue) compares UN country teams (UNCT) in Mozambique and Vietnam shedding light on institutional change across time and space: the analysis unpacks the sequencing of IO reform implementations while assessing diverging localized outcomes across UN spaces. Verlin (this special issue) captures internal spatiotemporal dimensions of IOs’ actions by exploring humanitarian planning techniques and how its temporalities are renegotiated “on the ground” through the specific case of humanitarian action in Haiti.…”

Section: Overview Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This disparity appears particularly strongly when it comes to individuals’ participation: time and space have a significant impact on who is participating in IO undertakings, de facto leaving aside some actors who cannot afford long‐haul travels or expensive rents (Dairon & Badache, this special issue; Kimber & Maertens, this special issue), or on the contrary allowing others to join (Eckl, this special issue). A less expected repercussion lies with the success of local actors in trying to capitalize on the role of time and space: while they may sometimes gain political power and concrete influence on IOs (Campos, this special issue; Dairon & Badache, this special issue), they can also be marginalized compared to distant stakeholders, such as donors and IOs’ headquarters, which succeed in imposing their rules at a distance (Verlin, this special issue). At the level of institutions, the spatiotemporal ecosystems can affect the performance and legitimacy of IOs, potentially bringing benefits and economies of scale, or being translated into cumbersome procedures or tensions between different departments, divisions or working groups over how to perform certain tasks (Dairon & Badache, this special issue; De Pryck, this special issue; Worrall, this special issue).…”

Section: Time Space and International Organizations: Cyclical Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conversely IOs often face moments of deep slowness when no agreement can be found on an urgent matter for months or years. In terms of spatial experiences, the material reproduction of IOs across multiple sites does not fully erase local specificities (Campos, this special issue) and individuals may experience both the spread of IOs’ actions or a shrinking IO space (Kimber & Maertens, this special issue). Indeed, while the deployment of a common policy agenda and similar development programs spreads IOs’ actions around the world (Campos, this special issue), IOs’ presence can be confined to a couple of blocks with restricted movements containing the UN experience to a limited space.…”

Section: Time Space and International Organizations: Cyclical Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time and space in the study of international organizations: An introduction

et al. 2021

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Picture a normal Tuesday morning, during the second day of negotiations at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. A diplomat who recently joined their country's permanent representation looks at the program of the day displayed on the entrance screen. While going through the long list of side events to identify the most useful ones to attend for their government, the young diplomat tries to remember the location of the different rooms inside the maze of the United Nations building. Next to them, a researcher is getting ready for a full day of observation, debating whether to attend side events (and which ones!), stay in the hallway in the hope of finally getting a few minutes to interview key negotiators or hang out in the cafeteria to stay upto-date on the UN staff discussions. While both are weighing their options, UN civil servants rapidly check the room for their next meeting, and quickly leave the entrance hall, heading without any doubt to the correct building.This brief immersion within the everyday of the UN reflects the complex system of interactions which characterizes international organizations (IOs). Conceptualized as both sites of international relations in the making and actors shaping global politics, IOs are made up of a diversified network of individuals. Indeed, IOs are not solely a group of member states: they are inextricably tied to both their bureaucracies and the (non-)state actors revolving around them (Weiss & Thakur, 2010). They constitute actors, fora and resources (Hurd, 2020) which participate and set

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Section: Overview Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Time Space and International Organizations: Cyclical Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Time Space and International Organizations: Cyclical Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time and space in the study of international organizations: An introduction

et al. 2021

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“…Thus, even though focal times and spaces make global health governance more predictable and coordinated than many people are aware of, there is the danger that these processes become disconnected from certain other aspect of global health governance. At the same time, it is not easy to account for local realities ‘as such’ since they are a spatiotemporal phenomenon, too, and experiences in one setting are not necessarily transferable to other settings (on the work of IOs at the country level, see Campos, 2021, in this issue, and Verlin, 2021, in this issue). While Regional Committees could play an intermediary role, they do not necessarily zoom in on the country level either and usually limit their focus to experiences in their specific region.…”

Section: The Spatiotemporal Dimension Of Who and Global Health Govern...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Focal Times and Spaces: How Ethnography Foregrounds the Spatiotemporality of International Organizations and Global Governance

Eckl

2021

Global Policy

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Drawing on a long-term political ethnography of sites of global health governance, the paper makes methodological and substantive contributions. First of all, it shows that ethnography induces researchers to experience international organizations (IOs) and global governance as spatiotemporal phenomena. This experience overlaps with the lived realities of practitioners and spotlights aspects that are otherwise easily overlooked. Both practitioners and ethnographers have to be in specific spaces at particular times. This practical challenge illustrates that there are focal times and spaces, which are linked to the cyclical and sited character of global health governance. These focal times and spaces provide an important coordination mechanism and ease the general flow of knowledgewithin IOs and between IOs and their environment. However, there is also the constant danger that they develop a self-referential life of their own and become disconnected from other processes. Similarly, not just researchers but also practitioners are struggling to develop a comprehensive understanding of IOs since they experience them only partially and in specific settings. Thus, a spatiotemporal account highlights both overlooked links and unexpected disconnections. The conclusion mentions that the current -COVID-19-inducedmainstreaming of digital technologies will impact the spatiotemporal dimension of global health governance. Policy Implications• Policy makers should more systematically acknowledge the contribution of focal times and spaces to the coordination of global governance processes and to the flow of knowledge.• At the same time, policy makers have to pay attention to the danger that these focal times and spaces can develop a self-referential life of their own and become disconnected from other processes.• Whether policy makers encounter global health at global focal times and spaces or in specific local settings, each firsthand experience has its specific limits. Policy makers should be aware of the limits of their own first-hand experiences and systematically complement them with other sources of information, including the experiences and views that others bring to the table.• The annual governance cycle links various meetings in a sequential manner and decisions are often precooked at meetings that take place before the main governance bodies convene. While some policy makers prefer this kind of upstreaming of decision making in order to smoothen the working of the governance bodies, they should not lose sight of the potentially negative consequences, for example regarding inclusiveness and transparency.

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“…In response to the slow humanitarian response in Darfur and the clear coordination problems in evidence after the 2004 tsunami, the UN instituted a wide‐ranging reform structured around a new ‘sectoral responsibility’ approach that contrasted directly to the traditional division of labour within the multilateral system. This governance system relies on theme‐based coordination bodies, or ‘clusters’, with a humanitarian coordinator at its centre (accompanied by a team of humanitarian sector professionals at the country level) (Campos, 2021), and new instruments for financing humanitarian action. Paradoxically, the UN designed a highly standardised system of humanitarian governance to overcome the complexities of localised humanitarian crises; this system relies on time as a concept to manage crises.…”

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confidence: 99%

Humanitarian Planning and Localised Temporalities: The Haitian Case

Verlin

2021

Global Policy

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This article shows, based on the Haitian crises after 2010, that international organisations (IOs) as central actors of humanitarian governance in complex crises situations rely on sequenced time frames to manage the diversification and massification of relief actors. At the same time, crisis professionals struggle to correlate their lived temporalities with this preconstructed time model when the localised crisis shifts from an event to a permanent temporality. The article is, therefore, guided by the following question: How is time strategically used by IOs in humanitarian governance and what are the effects of conflicting localised temporalities? The article argues first that different types of temporalities were associated with different groups of aid actors after the 2010 earthquake. The prolongated humanitarian crisis resulted in the repetitive adaption of UN appeal and funding instruments. Second, I show that the UN used planning instruments based on the disaster management cycle. Based on its cyclical temporality, UN actors combined it with humanitarian project management tools to govern aid projects by formalising the negotiation between the long-term aid programmes and the short-term duration of projects. I finally show the synthesis of both forms of temporal aid governance to control the contradictions between localised and funding temporalities. Policy Implications• International organisations (IOs) produce contradictions when they associate funding temporalities with crisis temporalities in order to manage actors on the ground. Based on this observation, the analysis suggests more flexible planning tools that allow longer and adaptive funding in humanitarian crises. Project lifecycles should systematically readjust to crisis temporalities and local actors.• The analysis pushes IOs to further reflect on the internal contradictions and hierarchies of time when designing time management instruments. Highly abstract planning instrument tend to establish a dominant implicit temporality that does not allow for the complexity of localised temporalities. Participatory country planning should dictate aid timeframes and not a preplanned exist-strategy.• By explicitly acknowledging different temporalities between headquarters and missions, IOs should distinguish between temporalities of project and programme funding, evaluations, actors and crisis phenomena in humanitarian planning in order to avoid contradictions and dysfunctionalities. The temporality of the localised crisis and the political temporalities of aid programmes should be the determining factor for IOs.• The case study emphasises that cyclical planning instruments can reproduce rigid linear temporalities when they are determined by a single event or process. Whereas cyclical instruments enable a focus on future crises, they tend to suppress parallel temporalities by directing attention to their endpoint. IOs should consider models that enable the management of parallel crisis processes.

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

Cited by 7 publications

References 16 publications

Time and space in the study of international organizations: An introduction

Time and space in the study of international organizations: An introduction

Focal Times and Spaces: How Ethnography Foregrounds the Spatiotemporality of International Organizations and Global Governance

Humanitarian Planning and Localised Temporalities: The Haitian Case

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