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International Organizations as Bureaucracies

Fri, August 30, 10:00 to 11:30am, Omni, Hampton Ballroom

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

More and more International Organizations scholars are examining the role of bureaucracies in IO functioning. This is in many ways a return to an earlier era in terms of area of focus; bureaucratic features played a substantial role in the IO literature from 1940 till the 1970s or so. But, of course, methods and the understanding of bureaucracy more broadly have changed substantially – as befits an evolving science – in the intervening decades.

This roundtable brings together scholars of international organizations with an interest in bureaucracy and scholars of bureaucracy with an interest in non-state bureaucracies to learn from one another. To scholars of bureaucratic politics, public management, and public administration, international organizations may provide novel variation in structures (accountability, reporting, management, etc.); to scholars of international organizations, there is great wisdom regarding these and many other issues in the scholarship on bureaucracy on which future scholarship ought build. In addition to a stimulating conversation, we hope that this roundtable might possibly contribute to an agenda for future research.

In sum, this roundtable brings together a disciplinarily and methodologically diverse group of scholars to discuss the challenges and opportunities of studying the bureaucratic features of international organizations. How transportable are theories from state bureaucracies to international organizations? What methodological challenges are posed by the wide variation in IO structures and authorizing environments? Are there empirical avenues of exploration that might contribute both to the substantive understanding of international organizations while also shedding light on important questions of theoretic interest to scholars of bureaucracy? How do bureaucracy scholars deal with issues of endogeneity, and how can those strategies be helpful from IR scholars seeking to distinguish among state preferences, IO design, and autonomous bureaucratic functioning?

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