Explaining sentiment shifts in UN system annual reporting: a longitudinal comparison of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM

Abstract

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.

What UNRWA Tells Us about Refugees and the United Nations

“…Having to renew its mandate so frequently makes it difficult for UNRWA to engage in longer-term planning, even though the Palestine refugee situation shows no signs of resolution after more than seven decades. Additionally, garnering state contributions has become an ever more competitive field in which UNRWA, UNHCR and IOM, which as noted has been affiliated with the UN since 2016, all make cases (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz 2021).…”

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

“…In terms of staff size, the UN system surpasses the European Union’s (EU's) supranational administration (see the 2012 IRAS special issue edited by Ongaro, e.g., Ongaro, 2012), with official UN staff statistics reporting a total of 114,119 UN system officials at the end of 2019 in 38 different UN system agencies (UNSCEB, 2020). These data exclude many short-term staff (less than one year), consultants and around 30,000 street-level staff working for the UN's Palestine refugee agency (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021). The majority of UN staff work outside global HQs.…”

“…Two contributions use text-as-data methods to study linguistic aspects of bureaucratic speech-making in the UN General Assembly (Gray and Baturo, 2021) and the differentiated use of sentiment in the annual reporting of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021). Both contributions use bureaucratic language as the dependent variable, while leaving open the impact that language may have on the audience(s) of speeches and reports.…”

“…Overall, the contributions in this special issue clearly demonstrate the growing diversity of research methods, including large-scale surveys (Busch et al, 2021), network analysis (Goritz et al, 2021), text as data (Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021) and mixed methods (Ege et al, 2021a), for studying UN bureaucracies as single or interrelated public administrations. There is growing interest in the relations between UN bureaucracies and diplomats or other national officials (Busch et al, 2021; Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021), as well as in dynamics that reveal inter-bureaucracy, systemwide or multilevel dynamics (Eckhard and Steinebach, 2021; Grohs and Rasch, 2021), and various studies also attempt to operationalize and measure bureaucratic influence. Future research on international bureaucracy and the UN system could combine these diverse efforts through increased interdisciplinary cooperation (Ege et al, 2021b; Fleischer and Reiners, 2021).…”