Mandate or Donors? Explaining the UNHCR’s Country-Level Expenditures from 1967 to 2016

Thorvaldsdottir, Svanhildur; Patz, Ronny; Goetz, Klaus H.

doi:10.1177/0032321720974330

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(91 reference statements)

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“…The UNGA is thus an arena where states strive for their economic interests. The donors seek influence over their contributions and money allocations (Bayram & Graham, 2017; Graham, 2015; Sridhar & Woods, 2013; Thorvaldsdottir et al, 2022), while the recipients seek funding for their development projects. Therefore, I hypothesise that countries that are development aid providers or receivers delegate more national representatives to the UNGA sessions than countries with no interest in the international development agenda (H4c).…”

Section: What Accounts For the Variation In The Size Of The National ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who cares about the UN General Assembly? National delegations size from 1993 to 2016

Vlček

2023

Global Policy

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The UN General Assembly is the central forum of world politics. While it formally allows the member states to delegate up to five representatives, the size of the national delegations is generally larger and significantly increases over time. In this paper, I explore the size of the national delegations to the General Assembly from 1993 to 2016. Generally, the major powers (USA, Russia) send the biggest delegations. Surprisingly, China sends significantly smaller delegations than it used to before 2008. Big delegations are also sent by some small (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland) or developing countries (Nigeria, Bangladesh). My analysis shows that national capacities and issue‐specific motivations drive up the delegation size. Although the issue‐specific explanations are relatively rare in UN‐related research (due to the general‐purpose nature of the organisation), I argue that human rights, international security, economic development, and UN governance are the agendas for which states care about the General Assembly.

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Section: What Accounts For the Variation In The Size Of The National ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who cares about the UN General Assembly? National delegations size from 1993 to 2016

Vlček

2023

Global Policy

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“…humanitarian crises) and better equipped to perceive and reflect on field-level sentiment. They also have an interest in advocating for negatively affected beneficiaries and staff to global-level stakeholders as part of their resource mobilization strategies (Thorvaldsdottir et al, 2021). However, this is conditional on where agencies interact with key stakeholders (Elsig, 2011).…”

Section: Affective Language Use By International Bureaucraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thorvaldsdottir

Patz

2021

International Review of Administrative Sciences

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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.

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Exclusion of Climate Migrants from the Global Compact on Refugees

Woodworth

2023

Geopolitics

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Mandate or Donors? Explaining the UNHCR’s Country-Level Expenditures from 1967 to 2016

Cited by 4 publications

References 56 publications

Who cares about the UN General Assembly? National delegations size from 1993 to 2016

Who cares about the UN General Assembly? National delegations size from 1993 to 2016

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

Exclusion of Climate Migrants from the Global Compact on Refugees

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