Bureaucratic Representation and Ethnic Bureaucratic Drift

Abstract

The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission's failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal-agent theory and bureaucratic representation theory. First, due to a lack of political and administrative oversight by Kosovar institutions and the UN peacebuilding mission, local municipal authorities experienced a high degree of autonomy. Second, those units within municipal administrations that were responsible for minority policy implementation did not include minority bureaucrats who could have acted as their communities' advocates. In the absence of such active representation and a lack of top-down supervision, the municipal civil service departed from its mandate to implement affirmative policies serving the Serb and Roma community in Kosovo. The article finds that this ethnic bureaucratic drift constitutes a central explanation for the lack of minority policy implementation in Kosovo between 2001 and 2008.

Political Failure, Citizen Feedback, and Representative Bureaucracy: The Interplay of Politics, Public Management and Governance

“…The US military has long over-represented individuals from 1. Eckhard (2014) presents an interesting case of a problematic United Nation's failure in Kosovo that he attributes in part to the lack of bureaucratic representation and thus the absence of any advocacy for minority positions in the process.…”

Implementation Failures as Learning Pathologies

“…Consider the phenomenon of infrastructures that are fundamentally designed to exclude certain groups and privilege others in order to realise a particular state identity. Eckhard's (2014) work on the United Nations (UN) mission's failure to implement policies on minority relations in Kosovo offers a salient illustration of what can happen where institutions lack political oversight and are free to exclude minority bureaucrats from working on affirmative policies. In this case, between 2001-2008, the municipal civil service drifted from its mandate to implement policies serving minority Serb and Roma communities.…”

Bureaucratic Representation and the Rejection Hypothesis: A Longitudinal Study of the European Commission’s Staff Composition (1980–2013)

“…We know little about this issue because it is hardly addressed by scholarly literature. Several authors have come close to opening this black box by addressing the issue of underrepresentation of specific ethnic groups in contexts of contested legitimacy 4 of states (Dauda 1990;Brown 1999;Esman 1999;Naff and Capers 2014;Eckhard 2014;Fernandez, Koma and Lee 2017). However, these studies identify post-conflict discrimination problems and above all issues of lack of education/qualification as decisive explanatory factors, probably because most of the states studied are emerging economies or developing countries where access to education represented an issue at least at the time of their research.…”