Mainstreaming international governance: The environment, gender, and IO performance in the European Union

Abstract

International organizations (IOs) have moved increasingly in recent years to adopt cross-cutting mandates that require the "mainstreaming" of particular issues, such as gender equality or environmental protection, across all IO policies. Successful IO performance with respect to such mandates, we hypothesize, is determined in large part by the use of hard or soft institutional measures to shape the incentives of sectoral officials whose cooperation is required for successful implementation. We test this hypothesis with respect to two such mandates-gender mainstreaming and environmental policy integration-in a single international organization, the European Union, demonstrating a strong causal link between the use of hard incentives and IO performance in these and related mandates.

Holy Grail or inflated expectations? The success and failure of integrated policy strategies

“…Regarding the first, a common gap identified is that the implementation of integrated strategies is highly sectorized at best, and limited to only one or a few government sectors out of a whole range of targeted sectors at worst (Drimie and Ruysenaar 2010;Vince 2015;Casado-Asensio and Steurer 2016). For example, studies of EPI strategies found that it is often only the environmental ministries or directorate-generals that engage in genuine implementation, whereas implementation beyond the environmental sector is generally weak (Jordan and Lenschow 2000;Hertin and Berkhout 2003;Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2010;Russel and Jordan 2010).…”

“…Hereby, it should be noted that not all integrated strategies aim at having a societal impact. For example, EU Environmental Policy Integration (EPI) commitments, as laid down in the Commission EPI program, the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, and the Cardiff Process, are primarily targeted at changing policy-making efforts (Schout and Jordan 2005;Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2010). Studies that do reflect on eventual outcomes provide diffuse but largely negative insights, whereby most researchers make the side-note that their analyses do not well-isolate the effects of integrated strategies from other factors (Section 4.4).…”

“…The other studies almost entirely restricted themselves to a programmatic evaluation rationale, although various authors indirectly provided some insights into the political construction of IPSs' success and failure. The latter is the most obvious in studies that take widespread disappointment and sense of failure with respect to a particular IPS as point of departure for their analysis, such as is the case with the studies of Pollack and Hafner-Burton (2010) and Schout and Jordan (2005) on EU EPI strategies and of Steurer and Clar (2015) on climate change mitigation in Austrian building policy. Conversely, in their analysis of the UK's EPI strategies, Russel and Jordan (2010) start from the OECD's praise for the British system, and later nuance the euphoria through their own -programmatic -analysis of what has been achieved.…”

“…Even if instruments are deployed to pursue the goals of integrated strategies, these are often ineffective (Klepp and Forster 1985;Nilsson, Eklund, and Tyskeng 2009;Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2010;Vince 2015). This ineffectiveness may result from inconsistent mixes, applying single instruments to multiple goals, or a lack of hard measures.…”

The European Union and Policy Coherence for Development: Reforms, Results, Resistance

“…Thus, the primary attraction of IAs, which obviously have a strong rationalistic appeal, would be that of making governments and regulatory agencies rely more on evidence-based analysis and of making them more accountable (Radaelli and Meuwese, 2010). However, the execution of IAs has not met initial expectations: numerous concerns have been raised on their overall quality, particularly the quantification of costs and benefits of alternative proposals and the effective involvement of stakeholders (Kirkpatrick and Franz, 2007;Pollack and Hafner-Burton, 2010;Torriti, 2010). The IA procedure was originally seen by the European Commission as a 'a powerful mechanism' to further advance the promotion of PCD -and was further stressed by the 2009 revised guidelines, stating explicitly that more attention would have to be paid to assessing the impact of all EU policies on developing countries (European Commission, 2009a) -and corresponds to the political commitment expressed by the EU's Foreign Affairs Council, which called for an 'evidence-based and result-oriented approach to promoting PCD' (Council, 2012).…”