No abstract

This contribution theorizes on the emergence of affective styles in the accountability reporting of public agencies. Under conditions of multiple accountability towards heterogeneous stakeholders, public agencies are expected to make increased use of sentiment in their reporting. Agencies’ differentiated modulation of positive and negative sentiment results in four ideal-typical affective styles: technocratic; political; alarming; and self-praising. The plausibility of this framework is demonstrated for the case of a major international public agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which serves several million Palestine refugees. We conduct a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of UNRWA annual reports published between 1951 and 2020, a corpus of 1.47 million words. Additional evidence from interviews with UNRWA officials and diplomats is also considered. Over time, the agency’s use of sentiment has increased in response to diversifying stakeholders and its affective style of reporting has changed repeatedly. Contrary to established theoretical expectations, multiple accountability not only increases positive reporting and self-praise. Rather, with increasing levels of negativity, the alarming and political styles of communication have played a much stronger role. These findings demonstrate that agencies’ chief goal in accountability reporting is not simply to elicit positive assessments from their respective accountability forums through self-praising language. Agencies may also aim to achieve ‘negativity congruence’ with accountability forums by increasing negative sentiment, thus compelling stakeholders to acknowledge the operational challenges agencies face.

Annual reports are a central element of international bureaucracies' accountability communication to member states and other stakeholders. Most UN system bureaucracies produce reports of significant length and detail. International agencies use these reports to draw attention to particular challenges or successes. Hitting the right tone with their diverse stakeholders is crucial to maintain continued support. UN agencies do so by employing differentiated sentiment-loaded language alongside factual reporting. We argue that agencies' operational focus, administrative structures and resource mobilization needs have a significant impact on how they use sentiment to communicate with different stakeholder groups. Drawing on a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of three text corpora of annual reports produced by three UN system agencies—UNRWA (reports published from 1951 to 2019), UNHCR (1953–2019) and IOM (2000–2019)—we show a general trend toward increased positive sentiment use across all three agencies, coinciding with a period of stronger donor orientation. At the same time, we find a more volatile and agency-specific use of negative sentiment in response to field-level challenges that are communicated to stakeholders in line with agencies' evolving mandates. Through a text-as-data perspective, this contribution enhances our comparative understanding of the diverse and context-dependent language of international bureaucracies. Points for practitioners Reading UN agency reporting, practitioners need to be aware of the constraints and incentives that international bureaucrats face—notably operational focus, administrative structures and resource needs—that drive tone differences across reports and over time.

Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

In recent decades, many international organizations have become almost entirely funded by voluntary contributions. Much existing literature suggests that major donors use their funding to refocus international organizations’ attention away from their core mandate and toward serving donors’ geostrategic interests. We investigate this claim in the context of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), examining whether donor influence negatively impacts mandate delivery and leads the organization to direct expenditures more toward recipient countries that are politically, economically, or geographically salient to major donors. Analyzing a new dataset of UNHCR finances (1967–2016), we find that UNHCR served its global mandate with considerable consistency. Applying flexible measures of collective donor influence, so-called “influence-weighted interest scores,” our findings suggest that donor influence matters for the expenditure allocation of the agency, but that mandate-undermining effects of such influence are limited and most pronounced during salient refugee situations within Europe.

In this chapter, we discuss the challenges of researching budgets and budgeting in international organizations. A key challenge is to recognize that there are different types of IO budgets, with different implications for different research questions. Researchers need to spend considerable effort to ensure reliability, validity and completeness of budget, expenditure and revenue data when conducting empirical research.

No abstract

Les rapports annuels sont un élément central dans la communication de la responsabilité des bureaucraties internationales aux États membres et aux autres parties prenantes. La plupart des bureaucraties du système des Nations unies produisent des rapports très longs et détaillés. Les agences internationales se servent de ces rapports pour attirer l’attention sur différents défis ou réalisations. Il est essentiel de trouver le ton juste à adopter pour communiquer avec leurs diverses parties prenantes en vue de conserver leur appui. Pour ce faire, les agences de l’ONU emploient un langage différencié, composé d’un mélange de sentiments et d’informations factuelles. Nous soutenons que l’orientation opérationnelle, les structures administratives et les besoins de mobilisation des ressources des agences ont un impact significatif sur la manière dont elles utilisent les sentiments pour communiquer avec les différents groupes de parties prenantes. Nous nous appuyons sur une analyse des sentiments basée sur le dictionnaire de trois corpus de textes de rapports annuels produits par trois agences du système des Nations unies – l’UNRWA (rapports publiés de 1951 à 2019), le HCR (1953-2019) et l’OIM (2000-2019) – pour mettre en évidence une tendance générale à l’augmentation du recours aux sentiments positifs dans les trois agences, qui coïncide avec une période de renforcement du souci pour les donateurs. En parallèle, nous observons une utilisation plus volatile et propre aux agences du sentiment négatif en réponse aux défis sur le terrain qui sont communiqués aux parties prenantes conformément à l’évolution des mandats des agences. Grâce à une perspective fondée sur le texte en tant que données, la présente contribution améliore notre compréhension comparative du langage diversifié et dépendant du contexte des bureaucraties internationales. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens En lisant les rapports des agences de l’ONU, les praticiens doivent être conscients des contraintes et des incitations auxquelles les bureaucrates internationaux sont confrontés – notamment l’orientation opérationnelle, les structures administratives et les besoins en ressources – qui entraînent des différences de ton entre les rapports et dans le temps.