Policy-making by international public administrations: concepts, causes and consequences

ABSTRACT

As the demand and necessity for greater international and transnational co-operation increase, the bureaucratic bodies of international organizations are receiving ever more scholarly attention. Yet, the relevance of international public administrations (IPAs) for global policy-making remains neither empirically nor theoretically well understood. A heuristic that links considerations of policy scope and policy type is provided to differentiate between the various aims and levels of potential IPA influence. Combining such a distinction with a taxonomy of administrative resources – namely, nodality, authority, treasure and organization – facilitates the development of concepts to systematically study patterns, constellations and conditions of IPA influence.

KEY WORDS:

• Bureaucratic influence
• global governance
• international governmental organisations
• international public administration

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jeremy Richardson for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christoph Knill holds the Chair of Empirical Theories of Politics at the University of Munich and is the speaker of the research unit ‘International Public Administration’.

Michael W. Bauer holds the Jean Monnet Chair for Comparative Public Administration and Policy Analysis at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation Grants FOR # 1745 TP 02 BA 3658/5-1 and FOR 1745 TP 01 GR 4365/1-1.