Project Description

With the growing importance of global institutions, bureaucracy has become a defining feature of the international system. International public administrations (IPAs), narrowly defined as the administrative bodies of international organisations, now play a greater role in domestic and international policy-making than ever before. They represent the most recent addition to the multi- level architecture of modern public administration, yet surprisingly little is known about their internal organisational structures and decision-making processes, their administrative cultures, their autonomy vis-à-vis their political principals, and their relationships with other administrations and societal actors. The proposed Research Unit addresses this lacuna by seeking to develop a Public Administration perspective on the administrative bodies of international organisations, ranging from small treaty secretariats to large bureaucracies such as the UN Secretariat and the European Commission.

In the first phase of the Research Unit, the sub-projects will systematically explore the formal structures and contours of a core set of IPAs in a comparative manner. Guided by basic conceptsfrom Comparative Public Administration and neighbouring disciplines, the Research Unit will develop a common framework built around the cornerstones of the concepts of political autonomy, administrative styles, delegation, authority, organisational differentiation, politicisation, and temporal structures. The guiding question in this phase is: How can we explain different patterns of administrative structures and their relationships to politics, nation-states, and societal actors?

In the second phase, the sub-projects will investigate the impacts of distinctive administrative patterns on the operations of IPAs. To this end, organisational change and adaptation, the coordination and interaction of IPAs with external actors and also national administrations, and finally the performance and policy-making capabilities of IPAs will be explored.

The proposed Research Unit will provide systematic data on the organisational structures and patterns of action of IPAs in a comprehensive manner. It will contribute to the theoretical development of the discipline of Public Administration by transferring comparative concepts to a new set of administrative bodies and seeking a dialogue with neighbouring sub-disciplines, in particular International Relations. The close cooperation of highly distinguished scholars in the field as well as the systematic involvement of young researchers will help to consolidate the relevance of Public Administration as a sub-discipline of Political Science.