Policy recommendations of international bureaucracies: the importance of country-specificity

Abstract

Many international bureaucracies give policy advice to national administrative units. Why is the advice given by some international bureaucracies more influential than the recommendations of others? We argue that targeting advice to member states through national embeddedness and country-tailored research increases the influence of policy advice. Subsequently, we test how these characteristics shape the relative influence of 15 international bureaucracies’ advice in four financial policy areas through a global survey of national administrations from more than 80 countries. Our findings support arguments that global blueprints need to be adapted and translated to become meaningful for country-level work. Points for practitioners National administrations are advised by an increasing number of international bureaucracies, and they cannot listen to all of this advice. Whereas some international bureaucracies give ‘one-size-fits-all’ recommendations to rather diverse countries, others cater their recommendations to the national audience. Investigating financial policy recommendations, we find that national embeddedness and country-tailored advice render international bureaucracies more influential.

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

“…Combining survey and process-tracing methods, Ege et al (2021a) find bureaucratic influence in important decision-making processes of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). Surveying national administrations in 80 countries on 15 UN system bureaucracies, the study by Busch et al (2021) shows that the influence of these bureaucracies’ policy advice depends on how well it is tailored to member states’ policy concerns. In a third contribution on bureaucratic influence, Goritz, et al (2021) combine survey and Twitter data in an inferential network analysis of the influence of the UNFCCC secretariat.…”

“…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).…”

Inter-sectoral prioritization of climate technologies: insights from a Technology Needs Assessment for mitigation in Brazil

“…In other words, a “one-size-fits-all” approach following strictly the TNA guidebook would have led to different results for the Brazilian TNA, probably less connected to the country’s reality and actual needs. This calls for the importance of country-specificity (Busch et al 2021 ) in the design of such technology development and transfer processes.…”

Cultivated ties and strategic communication: do international environmental secretariats tailor information to increase their bureaucratic reputation?

“…It has so far focused mainly on the national level (see, for instance, Carpenter, 2010;Gilad et al, 2015;Krause & Douglas, 2005;Maor & Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2013), with first studies on the EU level (e.g. Busuioc, 2016;Busuioc & Rimkutė, 2020;Overman et al, 2020) and, very recently, for international bureaucracies (Busch et al, 2021;Herold et al, 2021). One question that has not been researched empirically is to what extent international "agencies protect their reputations by responding to their multiple audiences" (Maor, 2015, p. 21).…”

“…What comes closest in this regard is the recent work by Busch, Liese and colleagues, who analyse the de jure and de facto expert authority of different IPAs in selected policy domains(Busch et al, 2020;Busch et al, 2021;Herold et al, 2021).…”