International Bureaucracies from a Political Science Perspective – Agency, Authority and International Institutional Law

Abstract

International bureaucracies are autonomous actors in a broader process of global governance. Their actions are oftentimes removed from the intentions and control of their creators; they affect other actors and engage in subject matters not formerly within their reach. Their factual impact remains underestimated. Little consolation can be found in the contention that international bureaucracies merely seek the effective implementation of global goals. A yawning gap unfolds between the mechanisms of control, means and ways for contesting the actions of bureaucracies and their actual exercise of public authority. These are the primary contentions motivating research on the development and conceptualization of international institutional law. This contribution sets out to corroborate these underlying contentions from a political science perspective. It subscribes to the approach that the exercise of public authority be framed in a rule-of-law context and highlights the implications of such an approach. It discards an exclusively instrumental view of international institutions that portrays them as tools in the hands of their creators or as mere instruments in pursuit of global goals. In conclusion, it emphasizes law’s constitutive role in providing a space for legal and political contestation as an indispensable prerequisite for the normative desirability of autonomous international bureaucracies. International Relations (IR) scholarship had for some time only provided a rather nebulous view of the performance of international organizations (IOs) and less formal institutions because its focus had rested on the question why IOs exist and persist. The question what IOs actually do, a conception of IOs as actors as well as an understanding and explanation of their actions, had long been largely overshadowed by the more fundamental theoretical entanglement of whether they matter at all. IR scholarship had been, so to speak, driving with a rearview mirror directed at those primary questions at the beginning of the road. This has certainly benefited our understanding of the importance of IOs but has also come at a regrettable loss. Most importantly, this focus has left IOs as actors in a dead angle from which they have only slowly emerged to attract some attention. This contribution conceptualizes parts of IOs and less formal institutions, in particular administrative or executive organs, as bureaucracies. It thereby elucidates their sources of autonomy and authority and highlights common mechanisms to which international bureaucracies resort in the exercise of public authority. In order to grasp their autonomous actions it appears necessary to divert more attention away from the rearview mirror directed at IOs’ embryonic stages under the tutelage of (dominant) constituent members. IOs have grown up. Attention should be given to the perimeters of their action, the sources of their autonomy and to how they act. In short, even if it were still doubtful that IOs do matter, it is not a bad idea to at least leer at IOs as actors. Otherwise they might emerge from the dead angle of research agendas to suddenly claim obedience. Jan Klabbers evocatively opens his Introduction to International Institutional Law with a quote from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: “You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!”

See Alexander Wendt, Driving with the Rearview Mirror: On the Rational Science of Institutional Design, 55 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION 1019 (2001).