Reform efforts, synchronization failure, and international bureaucracy: the case of the UNESCO budget crisis

ABSTRACT

International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver’s seat when it comes to achieving – or failing to achieve – reform under such conditions, whereas scholars of international public administration underline bureaucratic action or pathology as driving, or preventing, reform. By tracing UNESCO’s reform dynamics from 2011 to 2013, this paper demonstrates how a budget crisis can trigger major reform efforts by IO bureaucracies and by IO member states, but how the lack of joint and synchronized action by both actors still results in failed or limited reform. This contributes to key debates on international public administration, IO reform, and the role of budgetary crisis. The article suggests a dynamic and actor-centred theory of IO reform that highlights the need for synchronized crisis cognition and for substantively and temporally coordinated efforts of both states and bureaucracies as key elements for reform success – and their absence as explanation for failed reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Budget crisis
• international organizations
• international public administration
• reform
• UNESCO

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of cooperation of two projects of the DFG Research Unit on ‘International Public Administrations’ (FOR 1745), financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We would like to thank Vicky Kluzik for providing extensive research assistance. We are grateful to numerous UNESCO and national officials who have granted us their time and insights into UNESCO’s work through interviews and otherwise. The paper benefited substantially from the review process and we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Steffen Eckhard is assistant professor for Public Administration/ Organization Theory at the University of Konstanz.

Ronny Patz is a post-doctoral research fellow at Geschwister-Scholl-Institute, LMU Munich.

Sylvia Schmidt is an advisor at the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

ORCID

Steffen Eckhard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5320-0730

Notes

1 The report on the 2011 General Conference states: ‘Many Member States commended the Director-General’s efforts to […] concentrate on a limited number of strategic objectives’ (36 C/INF.20, 3).

2 Because the US did not actually leave UNESCO in 2011, the official budget was still formulated as if it was still a member state.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number EC 506/1-1].