The title of the article is somewhat of an oxymoron: as it is understood, how can global governance be managed? As it has emerged in international relations theory, global governance is a conceptual approach to describe how the world works politically in an era when a focus on the nation-state does not suffice. In that sense, global governance happens. It is not managed. It is a complex process of interactions at various levels. It is not purposive.
And yet, to people involved in the day-to-day business of global governance as part of the staffs of international organizations or delegations of Member States, the idea that global governance just happens does not fit the daily reality. There is purpose in the global order, and while no actor seems to control the outcomes, there are enough patterns of influence to suggest that some form of management occurs. While some of these patterns are similar to what happens within the Nation-State in the politics of government, they are sufficiently different to suggest that a focus on the politics of global governance means also looking at the nature of international public management.
This article explores the relationship between global governance and international public management as complementary ways to understand the way the world works at the end of the Twentieth Century. It looks at how, in the way of plug-ins to internet browsers, the idea of international public management can help expand the concept of global governance and make it an instrument that is more powerful both normatively and analytically.
Global governance has emerged as a dominant concept in international relations theory. Alternately normative and explanatory, it now has its own journal as well as an exponentially expanding literature.
It clearly emerged as a response to the inadequacy of either the classical realist or functionalist conceptions of global order to explain what had occurred at the end of the Cold War. Rosenau (1992) noted that governance is a more encompassing term than government, inclusive of non-governmental actors, a "system of rule" without, necessarily, authoritative institutions, which functions because of it acceptance "by the majority (or, at least, by the most powerful of those it affects)..." (p. 4) It is seen as a more comprehensive concept than regimes, an explanatory concept built on but somewhat of an alternative to the realist model, since regimes are issue-specific, whereas governance describes the whole political process at the international level.
Governance theoreticians hold diverse views about the importance of formal institutions in the process. Young (1995) argues that the new international institutions indeed are major actors, perhaps the most important ones, although he refers in this case to the formal institutions developed to deal with regimes. In commenting on an earlier formulation, Rosenau (1992, p. 9) notes that Young’s formulation
One consequence of this view has been to look away from formal institutions and, instead, look into the informal ways in which order is constructed. For example, Haas and Haas (1995) examine the role of technical knowledge in developing international approaches to environmental management in terms of what are called "epistemic communities". There is also an emphasis on non-governmental participants in the process, under the heading civil society. This term goes beyond the traditional non-governmental organizations that participate in activities of the United Nations to include, for example, the private sector. Lipschutz (1997), for example, discusses the connection between local environmental action groups and the international regimes related to the environment.
These tendencies coalesced with the report of the Commission on Global Governance (1995), which was influenced by the academic community but was itself largely made up of current and former international policy makers. In their view:
... At the global level, governance has been viewed primarily as intergovernmental relationships, but it must now be understood as also involving non- governmental organizations (NGOs), citizens’ movements, multinational corporations, and the global capital market. Interacting with these are global mass media of dramatically enlarged influence.
In these formulations, however, there is a sense that, in one way or another, control has to be present. Rosenau (1995, p. 16) notes that governance consists of "systems of rule at all levels of human activity -- from the family to the international organization -- in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has trans-national repercussions."
Taking the concept a step further and perhaps bringing it closer to earth, Finkelstein (1995) defines it as "governing, without sovereign authority, relationships that transcend national frontiers. Global governance is doing internationally what governments do at home."
In the literature, more attention is paid to governments or civil society than to the inner workings of the institutions themselves. Partly this is a legacy of the old realist models of international relations, in which the international secretariats would be seen at best as conference servicing entities (as indeed the League of Nations secretariat largely was) in a process essentially driven by national interest. Partly this is because there have been few analytical ways of seeing what the international secretariats actually do in the governance process. The main work on international decision-making is Cox and Jacobson (1972). They recognized that international organizations were "a system of interaction including all of those who directly participate in decisions taken within the framework of the organization, and in addition all officials and individuals who in various ways actively determine the positions of the direct participants.’ (P. 16).
There was a recognition that the secretariats, under their executive heads, played a role in decision-making. The study, however, was done in the 1970’s when the United Nations system was still constrained by the Cold War, and in any case emphasized the structural elements of decision-making rather than process. It would not have predicted that the importance of the secretariats as public service entities would be reflected in a growing tendency to select executive heads from within, as was the case with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Mohammed El-Baradei of the IAEA.
The trend away from looking at the inner workings of the international system as institutions was noted by Kratochwil and Ruggie (1986) based, inter alia, on an analysis of the contributions to International Organization over the period 1947-1984. Their analysis and that of Rochester (1986) showed a relationship with the perceived political problems of the United Nations and an effort by analysts to find analytical tools that would better explain international politics than looking at international organizations as institutions. Rochester, in fact, concluded that "international organization can be viewed as the set of instruments for making and implementing ‘transnational policy’ or ‘international public policy’ rather than merely as a patterned set of international interactions." (p. 812) He noted that the proposal "asks only for a more focused examination of the structures and processes associated with these institutions -- warts and all."
Indeed, if international organizations are to function as though they were governments, it may be useful to use the analytical tools that would normally be applied to national administrations, the tools of public management. In fact, an early application of these tools found many similarities in international public management to national public management (Mathiason and Smith, 1987). But that study also found significant differences.
A public management approach looks at how functions are performed and services delivered. It centers on the delivery system and its workings, on the processes and actors involved. A key factor is the policy environment, the context in which decisions and delivery take place. As such, it provides a view of the process from the inside looking out, rather than from the outside looking in. Many of the issues of international relations theory, such as the relative roles of civil society and the market, of dominance and subordination among States, become contextual.
A public management approach provides a different insight on the process, and centers on the often-invisible component of the governance models, the workings of the international institutions as an international public sector. The issue of peacekeeping, for example, has been subject to high-level scrutiny. However, an examination of the United Nations-led civilian police operations (UNCIVPOL) from a public management perspective (Smith, 1997) revealed many of the operational factors at play in this type of service.
In one respect, a public management approach is a reversion to the very early formal institutional analysis that characterized the study of international organization, by looking at the international public sector as formally-constituted institutions. In other respects, however, it builds on developments in both international relations theory where the less structural aspects of regimes explains how international collective action is determined, and in public administration theory where open systems approaches give emphasis to the informal dimensions of public management and the importance of the policy environment to the delivery of services.
Absent an examination of the public management aspect of international order, reform proposals will be incomplete and theoretical understanding, well, theoretical.
A public management perspective looks at international institutions in terms of a series of factors: the functions they perform, the services they deliver, the characteristics of the agencies, the actors involved in decision-making about services, the way in which these actors relate to their environment, the process under which the services are delivered, and the way in which the institutions are held accountable. The analysis can be applied to any non-private institution working at the international level, including the not-for-profit institutions of civil society. However, its main focus is on those whose funding and governance is essentially public. The purest institutions of this type are those of the United Nations system, but the category can also include non-universal public institutions like the regional development banks, the OECD and regional economic organizations. For this reason, the present article focuses on the UN system. Within the factors that constitute the international public management approach is a perspective on the international public sector that can help explain why they function as they do and how they can be reformed.
Since the United Nations system was created, at least in part, on a functionalist model, an international public management perspectives needs to begin by examining the functions performed. Cox and Jacobson (1973) included in their analysis of decision-making references to functions performed and included in their list "keeping the peace, promoting economic development, allocating the radio frequency spectrum, reducing obstacles to trade, ensuring that technology is used for only peaceful purposes, and facilitating the maintenance of stable exchange rates -- to name only a few" (p. 5). This of course is a combination of tasks, objectives and activities rather than a taxonomy of functions that are performed.
Delineation of functions has been used in social sciences to permit comparisons between social and political systems for some time. The work of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council in the 1960’s was an example (Almond and Coleman, 1960) which strongly influenced work in comparative politics. The delineation of functions permitted cross-national comparison by providing categories by which both different structures, processes and levels could be examined.
Application of functional analysis to the international public sector can also permit comparison of diverse institutions and help explain the differences between government in sovereign entities and governance in those that are non-sovereign.
For the purpose of examining system management, this study identifies five functions that are performed by the international public sector: regime creation, mobilization of information, direct provision of certain public services, norm enforcement and internal management. Each covers a wide variety of tasks and objectives.
It is generally accepted that one of the ways in which international order is maintained is through the negotiation of regimes to govern transnational conduct. This involves first agreeing on the areas where the actions of nations need to be harmonized, international cooperation achieved and international machinery employed. The next step is to define the norms that set standards of behavior, defined in terms of rights and obligations, that will govern that cooperation. The result of the process is usually a text that is accepted by governments ranging from a treaty through a resolution and which forms the basis for legitimate behavior by States -- and their citizens -- to be reflected in public policies and programs.
The process of regime creation has been a fertile one for scholars and the literature is large and growing. The volume edited by Krasner (1983), based on a special issue of International Organization, included cases dealing with security, trade and balance of payments. Subsequent studies dealt with human rights ( , ), managing the Arctic (Young and Osharenko, 1993), to name just two. There is a rich literature on the negotiation of the international climate change regime, embodied in the Framework Convention, including studies by Young (1993), Feldman (1994) and Paterson (1996).
While each regime differs in its substantive details, the process by which it is created is remarkably similar to that of others. At the heart of the process is extended multilateral negotiation. This is a remarkably complex: it usually extends over many years, involves intricate subsidiary negotiations among sub-groups of negotiators and over details, involves sequential changes in the diagnoses given to problems and a continual restructuring of agendas as differences narrow and the focus of negotiations sharpens. The roles of different actors -- governments, civil society and the secretariats of international organizations -- also change during the process.
The complexities are illustrated by the process of negotiating the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change as presented by Paterson (1996). The process began with an extended discussion of the nature (even the existence) of the problem, largely carried out in international scientific unions (civil society) and within the World Meteorological Organization (international secretariats). It was carried to the global level at the General Assembly (governments) which mandated a specific negotiation process on the definition of the problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and then to the negotiation of a specific framework for the regime and its general acceptance in a larger global context at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The regime is now being further articulated under the terms of the Framework Convention. The process has thus far taken some twenty years, although Paterson marks its emergence as a global issue at 1988. In contrast, the agreement on the regime for the Law of the Sea took twenty years to be effectively created from the time the Convention on the Law of the Sea was actually concluded.
The function of regime creation is making these negotiations possible. It involves providing the facilities for negotiation, what Cox and Jacobson (1973) deem the function of providing a forum. However, the function goes considerably beyond just providing facilities: it also includes maintaining an institutional memory about the flow of agreements, structuring the negotiation process through setting of agendas, influencing its direction through the presentation of information and analysis and affecting outcomes by providing access to non-governmental actors.
In terms of the services needed to perform the function, regime creation requires provision of conference servicing, good offices, policy analysis, information collection and dissemination and coordination services. Because the regime creation process is typically long, it makes full use of the value-added provided by career international civil servants. For example, the management of the International Tribunal on Law of the Sea comes from staff who were part of the process of supporting the negotiations of the Convention and its follow-up.
It would not be an exaggeration to state that the world swims in a sea of information. One of the functions of the international public sector is to provide comparative information collected and analyzed according to accepted standards and criteria and made universally accessible. The information thus collected and analyzed provides a common base for policy discourse, and allows many decisions to be taken by reference to rules. For example, the designation of countries as "least-developed" with the corresponding relaxation of international financial obligations and increase in access to concessional resources, is made on the basis of data collected under the United Nations System of National Accounts.
In terms of regime creation, mobilization of information has at least two links. The first has to do with monitoring the extent to which legitimacy is maintained in the regime through the performance by States of their obligations. In a system where only the exercise of legitimate power is possible, provision of information about illegitimate acts is the only means of compelling compliance. This information must be credibly provided by a politically neutral sources. The second is the maintenance of consistency in the interpretation of the obligations under the regime. It is the task of the international organization to be the "institutional memory" that safeguards the consistency of procedures to implement the regime and ensures that the modification of procedures, if required, will be orderly. Mobilization of information can also involve placing facts and interpretation on the international agenda that could help governments or civil society undertake their own actions, even if these are not intended to lead to agreements among States. It can also involve mobilizing information about the United Nations itself.
The information function of international organizations has been less subject to analysis by the scholarly community. Yet, much of the aggregate data used by economists, sociologists and political scientists are collected by the international public sector. The international public sector institutions, through the United Nations Statistical Commission and its secretariat, agree on collection standards. When national statistics are deemed unreliable, they are often corrected by international secretariats, most notably by the World Bank.
Included in the function is the provision of information about the international public sector. This function may be developing more rapidly as a result of new information technologies. In the past, governments took steps to limit the capacity of international organization secretariats to reach out to wider publics. The internet has begun to make international organizations considerably more accessible, particularly to organized parts of civil society.
Services provided in performance of the function include information collection and dissemination, policy analysis and coordination.
Over the past fifty years the United Nations has begun to undertake a series of functions in which it provides services directly. Cox and Jacobson considered a number of UN organizations to be service rather than forum organizations. Many of the services are like those that would be provided by a government, if there were one to provide them. Within the broad function of direct implement are three areas where the implementation function is performed: humanitarian assistance, peace and security services and development assistance. Each has as a common denominator that the United Nations acts in the same way that a state might. Each has its own distinguishing characteristics and can be examined separately.
Like the actions of an executive branch of government, in performance of this function, those of the international public sector are circumscribed by the enabling legislation that sets limits, and by the budgetary allocations that are made available to it. However, the agencies have considerable latitude in how they seek to provide their services. This is particularly true of humanitarian assistance and development assistance, although for different reasons. It is less true of peace and security assistance since the ability of the United Nations to take action also depends on the troop-contributing countries.
In all three areas, the international public sector is an intermediary, sometimes of last resort. In two, peace and security and development assistance, the function is to channel services from donors (or troop contributors) to recipients, with full recognition of all parties’ sovereignty. In practice, all three are funded voluntarily, thus making them to an extent donor-driven. Although in the case of peacekeeping missions mandated by the Security Council, funding is expected to come from assessments, in practice States can determine whether to contribute troops or not and some States have purposely refused to accept the assessments.
The actual services required for this function will vary according to the specific mandate of each mission, but will usually include some administrative tasks such as contracting for service delivery and financial management, policy analysis, provision of direct advisory services and information dissemination.
Over a period of time, the United Nations has taken on the responsibility of providing basic services to persons who, because of the absence of a national authority to take responsibility, have become the responsibility of the international community. They include refugees and persons displaced by armed conflict and natural calamity. Many of the services provided by the United Nations were once provided by national governments (e.g. the management of refugee camps) and the growth of United Nations responsibility reflects the inability of many governments in the developing countries to undertake these services.
In large measure, this function represents the enlargement of the Secretary-General’s responsibilities under article 6 of the Charter to include a wide range of situations where the United Nations is expected to be an actor in a situation where national action is deemed either inappropriate or unlikely. It ranges from exercise of good offices in the resolution of conflict through supervising elections, monitoring, training and organizing policy to the provision of armed forces and civilian staff to help provide the infrastructure necessary to maintain peace and security.
Perhaps because of its connection with the realist discourse, the peacekeeping functions has been subject to considerable analysis, including of its management.
Development assistance is a function that has grown out of the economic and social articles of the Charter, in which the international community provides advisory services, training and public investment as an alternative to bilateral aid. It is direct implementation in that the service is given directly to governments by public officials who are employed by the United Nations and involves provision of personnel, financing and technical support services.
Development assistance has tended to be seen in policy rather than functional terms, revolving around the North-South debate about transfer of resources and technology, but it should also be seen as a service that is provided by the international public sector.
The basic, least costly form of power, is founded on legitimacy, where decisions are accepted because they are considered right and rightly made. Enforcement in this context occurs by showing where there has been deviation from the agreed norms and where, by so indicating, the parties concerned are induced to adjust their actions to conform. The function of norm enforcement follows on the adoption by governments of agreements that they hold to be binding. The types of activities under this function range from the Charter-based judicial functions performed by the International Court of Justice, through the monitoring of human rights instruments and, more recently, through the monitoring and administration of international conventions in such diverse areas as law of the sea and international drug control and through the management of international war crimes tribunals.
While scholars of international law have looked at aspects of norm enforcement, the general absence of obvious enforcement mechanisms outside the direct ambit of Nation-States has meant that the function itself has been given very little attention. Human rights has been looked at, but, for example, international drug control has only a scant literature.
A function of all bureaucracies is internal administration and control, actions taken to keep the organization running in a way acceptable to its legislature. Within the United Nations this includes such routine activities as personnel and financial administration as well as the kinds of activities necessary to provide the organization with a structure in which it can be reviewed and held accountable. These include program planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation. It also includes the expenditure of resources to maintain buildings and to provide security for people who work in international space.
To see how these functions are reflected in the work of international organizations, I coded the 1996-1997 proposed program budget in terms of the function that was attempted to be performed. This was the last "pre-reform" budget and can be seen as a baseline for the reform process. As can be seen from Table 1 and Figure 1, all of the functions receive budgetary allocations. The table shows the total amount that could be attributed to programs having those functions. The importance of humanitarian assistance in that context is clear: the function amounts to half of the total shown.
Peace and security services show a relatively low proportion. This, however, reflects the fact that peacekeeping operations are budgeted separately and are not included in the organization’s program budget other than in terms of the basic permanent cadre of staff concerned with administration.
Table 1. Functions performed as a proportion of the total budget of the United Nations, 1996-1997
| Function | Total budget | Percentage |
| Development assistance | 317,650.0 | 4.5% |
| Norm enforcement | 236,296.0 | 3.3% |
| Humanitarian assistance | 3,547,687.6 | 49.8% |
| Internal management | 1,364,966.3 | 19.2% |
| Mobilization of information | 485,185.9 | 6.8% |
| Peace and security assistance | 129,070.1 | 1.8% |
| Regime creation | 1,041,040.8 | 14.6% |
| Grand total | 7,121,896.6 | 100.0% |
The total budget of the United Nations for 1996-1997 included an estimate of $4.45 billion in voluntary or extra-budgetary funds. These are provided on the basis of special pledging, especially in the humanitarian area, and contributions by individual governments to trust funds maintained for specific purposes. The activities funded from these sources reflect, in many ways, the priorities of the major contributors.
The regular assessed budget of the organization reflects what can be agreed among all of the Member States. In some respects, it is a better indicator of the functions that governments want the organization perform, or that, over successive budgets, they have allowed the Secretary-General to perform. Table 2 shows the functions as a proportion of the regular, assessed budget.
Table 2. Functions performed as a proportion of the regular assessed budget of the United Nations, 1996-1997
(US$ ‘000)
| Function | Regular budget Total | Percentage |
| Development assistance | 93,718.3 | 3.5% |
| Norm enforcement | 80,386.6 | 3.0% |
| Humanitarian assistance | 91,947.3 | 3.4% |
| Internal management | 1,220,950.6 | 45.4% |
| Mobilization of information | 416,624.2 | 15.5% |
| Peace and security assistance | 91,106.3 | 3.4% |
| Regime creation | 692,334.2 | 25.8% |
| Grand total | 2,687,067.4 | 100.0% |
In order to perform these functions, the United Nations delivers specific services. These can be classified in terms of what is actually produced or done and illustrates what the public moneys that are spent on the organization "buy".
A total of twelve types of services were identified: administration, advisory services, provision of buffer forces, conference servicing, contracting for direct services, control, coordination, collection and dissemination of information, legal services, negotiator services, policy analysis and subventions to governments. These differ from the usual way in which the United Nations presents what it does in its budgets. In some budget sections, there is a description of the specific services provided (e.g. number of telephone connections), in most there is a description of output (so many reports prepared for intergovernmental bodies). Most programs in fact produce a variety of output. The service categories used in this analysis seeks to look at the primary kind of product delivered, measured both in terms of the output and the purpose of the activity.
Table 3 and Figure 3 show the distribution of total 1996-1997 budget resources among these twelve services. The contracting of people and supplies to provide basic services to populations for which the United Nations has been made responsible constitutes the largest service. It includes much of the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as well as the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The service is entirely financed from extra-budgetary sources. Over a fifth of the resources in the program budget are used for administration.
Table 3. Services provided as a proportion of the total United Nations budget, 1996-1997
| Service | Total budget | Percentage |
| Administration | 1,492,566.4 |
21.0% |
| Advisory services | 632,481.6 |
8.9% |
| Buffer force provision | 10,323.7 |
0.1% |
| Conference servicing | 481,168.4 |
6.8% |
| Contract direct services | 3,180,167.6 |
44.7% |
| Control | 96,211.8 |
1.4% |
| Coordination | 248,029.1 |
3.5% |
| Collection and dissemination of information | 378,782.3 |
5.3% |
| Legal services | 72,902.9 |
1.0% |
| Negotiator services | 75,881.8 |
1.1% |
| Policy analysis | 433,608.6 |
6.1% |
| Subventions to governments | 19,772.4 |
0.3% |
| Grand total | 7,121,896.6 |
100.0% |
Table 4. Services provided as a proportion of the assessed budget of the United Nations, 1996-1997
| Service | Regular budget amount | Percentage |
| Administration | 1,206,845.4 |
44.9% |
| Advisory services | 103,455.9 |
3.9% |
| Provide buffer forces | 10,323.7 |
0.4% |
| Conference servicing | 477,446.3 |
17.8% |
| Contract direct services | 0.0 |
0.0% |
| Control | 68,517.3 |
2.5% |
| Coordination | 97,463.4 |
3.6% |
| Collection and dissemination of information | 306,212.3 |
11.4% |
| Legal services | 60,542.5 |
2.3% |
| Negotiator services | 47,585.4 |
1.8% |
| Policy analysis | 289,040.7 |
10.8% |
| Subventions to governments | 19,634.6 |
0.7% |
| Grand total | 2,687,067.4 |
100.0% |
Almost half of the assessed resources of the organization are used to provide administrative services, between the 44 percent on administration and the 2.5 percent on control. If services related to coordination are also included, the total would amount to over half. These are found in the Department of Administration and Management and in the administrative offices of all of the substantive departments. If only personnel costs are considered, however, the proportion accounted for by administration drops to 40 percent.
The next largest service, not surprisingly, is conference servicing, followed by information collection and dissemination and policy analysis.
There is a rough correspondence between function and service, as can be seen from Table 5. Advisory services comprise most of the resources for development assistance; administration makes up the bulk of services under internal management, and conference servicing constitutes two-thirds of the services under regime creation. However, under most functions, a variety of services are provided. The broad nature of the categories used clearly masks some of the services provided and the nature of the budget masks others. For example, the work of special representatives in providing negotiator services in the context of peace and security is absent, since these are in the main not financed from the regular budget, nor are most of their specific administrative costs.
International agencies are not world government and therefore any analogy to national or sub-national government and its management has to be made with considerable care.
The defining characteristic of international administrations is that they lack the attribute of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not tangible: it is an idea, a concept, whose legitimacy is accepted. It presumes that there is, within each territory, some final authority that must be accepted, a monarch or a constitution which must be obeyed, that is accountable to the people of the State and which is recognized by other States. By definition, international organizations are not sovereign. The United Nations Charter reflects this clearly in its Article 2 when it states "Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter." While the same article implies that intervention might be possible, this is restricted to the peace and security issues set out in Chapter VII of the Charter.
The characteristics of a sovereign-less public institution have rarely been explored. Young’s (1994) examination of international governance in a state-less society implies sovereign-less institutions but his concern is more with the process of forming the regime than with its management. Nevertheless, it is possible to infer some of these characteristics from the nature of sovereignty itself.
In a non-sovereign institution, there is no central authority. In contrast to a national government, whose Chief Executive could have a plaque on his desk stating that "the buck stops here" based on delegation of authority from a constitution or a legislature, in the international public sector the buck stops nowhere. To the extent that each chief executive of each established international organization is beholden only to his (or now, increasingly, her) intergovernmental governing body, each is independent and equal. This is reflected in the makeup of the only formal coordination body for international organizations of the United Nations system, the Administrative Committee for Coordination, which is chaired by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as primus entre pares.
By extension, international public organizations will have characteristics somewhat different from national administrations, to wit:
• Issues of command and control will be particularly complex.
In practice, the United Nations system and, in effect, all non-United Nations international public organizations were set up to perform functionally specific tasks. The degree of specificity could range from those whose functions and services are set out in detail in international conventions and are extremely limited to those whose charter covers an entire economic sector. An example of the first would be the World Intellectual Property Organization whose terms of reference are limited by the Bern and Paris Conventions and their subsequent modification. An example of the second would be the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The exception to the rule might appear to be the United Nations Secretariat itself since, by servicing the Security Council and the General Assembly, it can theoretically be involved in any issue before those bodies. In practice it deals with both residual issues for which there is no specialized agency and issues which are, in an international agency sense, trans-border by crossing the jurisdictions of several agencies. An example of the former is some work done on treatment of criminal offenders that accrued to the United Nations from the League of Nations work on penal reform. An example of the latter is the increasingly ramifying central structure dealing with environment and sustainable development.
The means of ensuring consistency in the performance of functions and the delivery of services across the international system is coordination. Here, however, the type of coordination possible is limited by the absence of central authority. A more appropriate model is that set out in Chisholm’s (1988) study of coordination in non-hierarchical organizations which, however, was examining a sub-national set of administrations (transportation agencies in the San Francisco Bay area).
Management of international organizations is, by definition, more complex than national administration if only because the environment with which decision-makers must deal is itself more complex. Not only must they respond to a varied and shifting intergovernmental review process and the varying interests of up to 185 sovereign States, but they must attend the concerns of an increasingly important civil society as well as their own bureaucracies. This provides both constraints, which can be seen and are often articulated by international executives, and informal freedom to act, which is almost never articulated and is rarely seen.
The formal constraints, that a manager works within a highly constrained resource situation, requires formal mandates for almost any managerial change, must deal with a large number of sovereign entities as well as other international institutions over which he or she has no authority, are well-known. The ultimate refuge of an international executive in trouble has always been, "the Member States requested it" which is the equivalent of saying "the Devil made me do it."
The informal freedoms derive from the ability to use the structuring of information, the influencing of key delegations and juggling of the large number of competing interests to move ahead both ideas and the organization’s interests. When this is done adeptly, it can free decision-makers from many of the constraints that would affect a national official. As an example, UNESCO’s Amadou Maktar M’Bow was able to push his organization in directions that were extremely unpopular with his major contributors, as has been documented by Righter (1995). A more positive example is the role played by Mostafa Tolba, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, in the negotiations for the Montreal Protocol on the Ozone Layer (Young, 1994, p. 173). Persons who have been involved in the long negotiation processes that have lead to international agreements, whether as government delegates, secretariat staff or non-governmental organizations, can testify to the role played by international bureaucratic entrepreneurs.
Examining the environment in which decisions are taken involves examining the actors involved, their interests and role.
The concept of global governance sets out a framework for looking at the international system consisting of three levels and three actors. Building on Rosenau (1992, p. 14), there are three levels at which it can be analyzed: the ideational -- or the level of perceptions of people, the behavioral -- or what people regularly and routinely do to maintain global arrangements, and the aggregate or political level -- "where governance occurs and rule-oriented institutions and regimes enact and implement the policies inherent in the ideational and behavioral patterns." There are also three actors: Governments, civil society and the secretariats of international organizations.
Table 6 shows how these categories of actors differ in terms of each level. Of particular interest is the role of the international secretariats. In contrast to the other two actors, the secretariats collectively take on a global interest. Multi-national in composition and having a common ethic, the international secretariats consciously expound a global collective interest, derived in some measure from agreements among governments and support by civil society, but clearly also pushed by the secretariats themselves.
Table 6. Differences among actors by level
| Actor/level | Ideational (basis of perceptions) |
Behavioral (form of action) |
Aggregate or political |
| Governments | Calculation of national interest | Enact and maintain public policies and programs | Intergovernmental bodies and their national counterparts |
| Civil Society | Group or sectoral interest | Work through the market (for goods or ideas) | International forums and coalitions |
| International secretariats | Calculation of global interest | Structure regimes, mobilize information to create and maintrain regimes and enforce norms | International agencies, inter- and intra-secretariat structures |
The international public management process includes playing off the ideational and behavioral preferences of the various actors in order to achieve objectives, perform functions and deliver services. A classic case would be the work of Unicef, under James Grant, in promoting child survival. Working from the basic mandate of Unicef, but mobilizing information about the State of Children, Unicef under grant determined that the major vectors in child mortality were easy to confront (e.g. dehyration by the use of rehydration salts, most childhood diseases by immunization) given a political commitment and minimal infrastructure. Unicef used its information dissemination capacity (as well as discretionary funds) to organize the Children’s Summit in 1991, in which Heads of State or Government were induced to commit themselves to broad policies for child survival.
Examining the processes by which international public management takes place illuminates many of the differences between national and international administration. These can be seen clearly in terms of four different processes: planning, decision-making, coordination and finance. These are, of course, inter-related. Planning is in many ways contingent on expectations of finance, coordination involves decision-making processes and finance is linked to decision-making processes.
The issues with which the international public sector are called to deal are, in addition to their multiplicity, ones that are not quick to resolve. Planning horizons are typically longer-term than would normally be the case for national public administration.
Many of the activities are organized around decades (the United Nations Decades for Persons with Disabilities, Youth, Women and International Law, to name a few), most of the agencies of the system work under medium-term plans whose horizon is six years (although the United Nations Secretariat itself has recently reverted to a four-year plan horizon).
In some ways this is realistic: most international agreements to establish regimes require decades of negotiation, and have to be seen as phases. For example, the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted with relative speed, began formally in 1988 when the General Assembly endorsed a decision by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization to establish an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, the IPCC was itself the result of a process of consensus building that can be said to have started in 1968 with the creation of the World Wide Weather Watch (see Paterson, 1996, Chapter 2). The agreement leading to the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the result of a process that began in 1948 and before.
The nature of the issues and the length of the planning horizon reinforce the position of the international public managers, since they clearly outlast the governmental delegates and even most of the representatives of civil society. As the guardians of continuity they can be, on the whole, a somewhat conservative force, as bureaucracies usually are. This is reinforced by a devotion of the Member States to mandates, as reflected in resolutions. This tends to keep programmatic innovation somewhat in check, as does the fact that the financial rules and regulations of most international organizations presuppose a planning, programming and budgeting approach in which programs and budgets are supposed to be derived from approved plans.
One consequence is that managers of the international programs are required to take a longer-term perspective on their work and to see progress in sequential steps. Good managers can see that all progress is incremental and will plan increments carefully. However, since these incremental strategies are seldom articulated, they are not easy to observe.
Given that most decision-making in international organizations will be taken over a long period of time and in a complex environment involving a large number of parties, the processes are not easy to discern, let alone analyze. The exception is the decision-making of the Security Council which, by mandate, responds to crisis and it is no surprise that most analysis of United Nations decision-making focuses on that body. (See, for example, Kaufmann, 1980). There are few case studies of decision-making in the United Nations, but those that exist, like Oliver’s (1978) study on the United Nations Relief Operation in Dacca, show the complexity (and the slowness) of the process, even when the issue at hand is urgent. Many of the studies, in fact, have been written by persons who were themselves party to the decisions or who were part of the organizations that made them, as was the case with both Kaufmann (a Dutch ambassador to the United Nations) and Oliver (who was the Senior Reports Officer of the UN Operation).
None of the decision-making models applied to foreign policy decision-making (like Snyder, Bruck and Chapin, 1962) really fit the multi-lateral decision-making context of international organizations. The process is slow and often imperceptible. There are few events and most decisions are the result of accumulations of smaller decisions. The large number of parties to any decision and the flexibility of the positions taken, both in a given time period and over time, make it difficult to determine which factors were critical.
In part this is due to the fact that the dominant mode of decision-making at the international level is consensus. Recourse to the vote is extremely rare, except in the Security Council, since in a system where States are sovereign, a negative vote means that the State casting it does not consider itself bound by the outcome. The implications of decision-making by consensus have not been systematically studied, but some of them can be inferred. Consensus decision-making is inherently non-zero-sum. States accept a consensus because they perceive that the positive elements of the decision outweigh the negative. The calculus of costs and benefits of a decision can extend beyond the boundaries of the decision itself by linking elements to other issues. Thus, consensus decision-making gives decision-makers considerably more flexibility since they can justify acceptance of otherwise negative elements because of the linkages of the positive elements.
Members of the secretariats affect the outcome of intergovernmental decisions by the ways in which they arrange to have the agendas of meetings structured, by the cast given to the documents that form the basis to discussions and through their role as facilitators of negotiations.
While each component part is bureaucratically organized, the United Nations system itself is both constitutionally and practically, non-hierarchical in nature. Each of its components is independent of the others. This has led to a frequent concern with coordination on the part of major contributers who assume that system work on issues that cut across organizational domains must be duplicative.
Formal coordination structures like the Administrative Committee on Coordination or the Committee for Programme and Coordination have been perceived to be notoriously ineffective. Efforts to force coordination by creating hierarchy has proven to be politically impossible, as the effort to consolidate all of the humanitarian assistance agencies under a single head has shown. The recommendation by Childers and Urquhart (1994, pp. 62 and 190-191) for a United Nations System Consultative Board has found no resonance among either governments or secretariats.
Ironically, informal coordination mechanisms make the system work fairly well. It is an example of coordination without hierarchy such as analyzed by Chisholm (1989). Two conditions seem to be necessary. First, there is a natural division of labor among the various agencies concerned in the sense that, although they are all involved in the same issue, they approach it from different perspectives. Second, the various organizational units concerned talk to each other and are aware of each other’s activities. Coordination difficulties ensue when one or both of these conditions are absent.
Studies of program coordination in the system are rare. A series of secretariat reports on coordination mandated by the United Nations Committee for Programme and Coordination during the first half of the 1980’s, called cross organizational program analyses (COPAs) were discontinued because they inevitably found that coordination problems were insignificant.
In the international system, however, there remains a lingering fear that coordination arrangements are not as effective as they could be. For example, it was a manifest inability of the main organizations of the United Nations system to address the problem of HIV/AIDS coherently that led to the creation of a separate United Nations Programme on AIDS.
Over the history of the United Nations system, most crises have been financial. How to fund the international public sector has been an unresolved question almost from the beginning. There are three means that currently are used, with variable success. The fourth means, a form of global taxation, has yet to be tried.
The essential means is through assessments on Members States as a condition for membership. In the United Nations system, minutiously elaborated methods for establishing assessments and for determining budgetary sizes exist. The system, however, requires that all Member States pay in full and on time, a condition that has rarely been met. The advantage of this method of financing is that it ensures that funded programs will reflect an agreed nearly universal consensus. The disadvantage is that it makes changes in priorities rather difficult.
The second means is voluntary contributions by Member States and, as in the case of Unicef, the public. These have proven to be variable over time and, in any case, reflective of donor priorities. The recent pledge of a contribution to United Nations humanitarian work made by Ted Turner could foreshadow an increase in contributions from civil society, but commentary suggests that reliance on this form of financing could compromise the nature of the.
The third means is earnings from services provided. This can range from such minor items in the budgets of organizations as income from sales of publications and from guided tours through greeting card sales by Unicef to the income earned by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund from interest on their loans.
The fourth means would be a levy or tax on transactions in the global commons as a means of raising resources for the international institutions that manage the commons. This has been discussed extensively by Mendez (1992, especially Part IV) and there is a growing literature on aspects of it such as the Tobin Tax ( ). It should be noted that this approach to finance was explicity rejected by the expert group on financing the United Nations as well as congressional leaders in the United States.
National governments are accountable to their citizens, through legislative and electoral processes. The same is not the case with the international public sector. Theoretically, it is the Member States who oversee the work of the international organizations and each has its own program and budget committee or committees. However, these structures are exceedingly complex and, if the recurrent efforts to reform them are an indication, not particularly effective. Despite the fact that resolution of most of the United Nations financial crises has involved some new effort at improving accountability, the few studies of the process have suggested that the efforts have been largely unsuccessful (Mathiason, 1987 and 1997).
The result is a stalemate in which governments can fix levels of expenditure but cannot alter priorities and executive heads can have considerable flexibility within those levels but also cannot alter priorities. With the exception of a few blatant cases of fraud, mismanagement cannot easily be detected and successes can only be demonstrated with great difficulty.
Global governance without some resolution of the accountability problem cannot be credible and accountability can only be seen in the details of the work of the organizations who are to be held accountable for their use of resources.
An examination of the issue of global governance from an international public management perspective suggests the emergence of a form of state apparatus that is qualitatively different from its homologues at the national level. It identifies services being provided and process and structural issues that condition whether these services help form the basis for governance. Mostly, it raises more questions than it answers. The dominant approaches to international organization do not focus on the international public sector as entities which must be studied in their own right. As a result, answers to the questions, as far as research and teaching are concerned, are infrequent.
Ultimately, the debate on multilateralism, new institutionalism and global governance will have to focus on the institutions in which the process is structured. Looking at them will involve applying tools of political analysis that are used to look at public management at any level. But applying these tools to the international public sector will involve nuances that, in many ways, will change their nature.
This in turn suggests the need for a research agenda on the international system as institutions. It will be necessary to fill some gaps. It will be necessary to examine the complex decision-making processes in multilateral negotiations to create regimes, taking into account that the processes extend over time, have internal subroutines and involve actors, not all of whom are particularly visible.
It will be necessary to look at the emerging function of norm enforcement, as international institutions are called upon to use the power of information to induce governments and civil society alike to follow the agreed norms in a growing number of international agreements.
And finally, it will be necessary to look at the processes of leadership selection, management, monitoring and evaluation of the international public sector with the same degree of precision as is applied to national institutions. It will be necessary, perhaps, to start again from where Cox and Jacobsen (1973) left off, with a clearer sense of what has to be observed and analyzed.
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©1997, John R. Mathiason