"Providing a comprehensive overview of two centuries of international civil servants and international secretariats, this book reveals how international secretariats have emerged and evolved, focusing on both structures (international public administrations) and the practitioners (international civil servants)"--
Providing a comprehensive overview of two centuries of international civil servants and international secretariats, this book reveals how international secretariats have emerged and evolved, focusing on both structures (international public administrations) and the practitioners (international civil servants). Reinalda explores the history and development of international secretariats and international civil servants, starting with the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), when the first international organization was established in the form of a river commission for the navigation of the Rhine. Charting the development of international secretariats through the nineteenth century – the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the United Nations System with its many specialized agencies, the author explains why NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) have strong, rather than weak, international secretariats, and shines a light on the registries of international courts and tribunals. The book fills a gap in the literature by exploring the full evolution of international secretariats, covering global and continental developments as well as regional integration practices around the world. Secretariats have become the leading actors in multilateral diplomacy particularly for dealing with complex issues, and this book will be of interest to all scholars of global governance and practitioners working for a range of international organizations.
Virtually every important question of public policy today involves an international organization. From trade to intellectual property to health policy and beyond, governments interact with international organizations in almost everything they do. Increasingly, individual citizens are directly affected by the work of international organizations. Aimed at academics, students, practitioners, and lawyers, this book gives a comprehensive overview of the world of international organizations today. It emphasizes both the practical aspects of their organization and operation, and the conceptual issues that arise at the junctures between nation-states and international authority, and between law and politics. While the focus is on inter-governmental organizations, the book also encompasses non-governmental organizations and public policy networks. With essays by the leading scholars and practitioners, the book first considers the main international organizations and the kinds of problems they address. This includes chapters on the organizations that relate to trade, humanitarian aid, peace operations, and more, as well as chapters on the history of international organizations. The book then looks at the constituent parts and internal functioning of international organizations. This addresses the internal management of the organization, and includes chapters on the distribution of decision-making power within the organizations, the structure of their assemblies, the role of Secretaries-General and other heads, budgets and finance, and other elements of complex bureaucracies at the international level. This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and students alike.
This Handbook brings together scholars whose essays discuss significant issues with regard to international organization as a process and international organizations as institutions. Although the focus is on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are discussed where relevant. The handbook is divided into six parts: Documentation, Data Sets and Sources International Secretariats as Bureaucracies Actors within International Bureaucracies Processes within International Bureaucracies Challenges to International Organizations, and Expanding International Architectures. The state-of-the-art articles are meant to encourage current and future generations of scholars to enjoy working in and further exploiting the field and are also of great interest to practitioners of international organization and global governance
Introduction -- Navigating the Cold War -- Navigating the Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds -- Organization, Mandate -- Leaders -- Programmes, Resources -- The International Bill of Human Rights -- Studies and Reports -- Implementation -- Petitions and Fact-Finding -- Voices of Conscience -- Promotion and Advisory Services -- Partnership with NGOs and Civil Society -- Conclusion.
The essays in this collection argue that ? contrary to some private-sector populists ? the state is in the best position to lead in making policy in a rapidly changing world and should retain and refine this responsibility.
Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this Handbook investigates new public spaces of transnational policy-making, the design and delivery of global public goods and services, and the interdependent roles of transnational administrators who move between business bodies, government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations. This Handbook is novel in taking the concepts and theories of public administration and policy studies to get inside the black box of global governance. Transnational administration is a multi-actor and multi-scalar endeavour having manifestations, depending on the policy issue or problems, at the local, urban, sub-regional, sub-national, regional, national, supranational, supra-regional, transnational, international, and global scales. These scales of 'local' and 'global' are not neatly bounded and nested spaces but are articulated together in complex patterns of policy activity. These transnational patterns represent a reinvigoration of public administration and policy studies as the Handbook authors advance their analysis beyond the methodological nationalism of the nation-state.
This completely revised and rewritten handbook gives an overview of international organization (IO) as a dynamic field of research that adds to our understanding of global and regional relations and related domestic politics. Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, it considers both IO as a process and multilateral organizations as institutions. This handbook is divided into five parts: I. Documentation, sources and perspectives II. International secretariats as bureaucracies III. Actors within and beyond international bureaucracies IV. Processes within and beyond international bureaucracies V. Challenges to international organizations Containing new chapters on topics such as the anthropological perspective, IO secretariats in several continents outside of Europe, feminization, the digital turn and challenges to IO legitimacy, the contributors reflect on the progression of IO studies from a burgeoning field to a well‐established subfield of international relations and the move away from scholarship based mainly in North‐Western Europe and the United States. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of IOs, global governance, diplomacy and foreign policy, as well as practitioners of multilateral cooperation.