Offene oder geschlossene internationale Organisationen: Bedingungen für Politikwandel durch Kontestation
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Affected people, who are supposed to be protected by international prohibition norms, often protest against these rules and the international organizations (IOs) that disseminate and implement them. They organize transnationally to contest IO policies. This project analyzed the conditions under which IOs change their policies in response to such contestation – as those directly affected by international policy decisions should have a voice in global governance processes. The project went beyond existing research, which is based on two competing assumptions: Either IOs are portrayed as bureaucratic containers, which filter external influences through their rigid organizational structures and cultures. Based on this assumption, civil society protest against norms represented by IOs is assumed to be taken up rhetorically and procedurally but rarely leads to profound policy change in IOs - IOs are, therefore, “closed organizations.” Current research, on the other hand, describes IOs as “open organizations”: due to New Public Management reforms, organizational cultures and structures are becoming increasingly permeable, and their formal “boundaries” play less of a role. Instead, sectorspecific professional networks in IOs fight for control. The assumption derived from this line of reasoning is that civil society protest does not fail because of an IO’s bureaucratic culture, but its success depends on the ability to generate support from thematic professional networks within IOs. The project combined these often contrasted strands of constructivist IO research in an empirical research design: an open organizational culture and structure should bring about more policy change, a closed organizational culture and structure should bring about less policy change as an IO reaction. The project compared the responses of ILO, UNICEF, UNODC, and WHO in four policy areas: Drug control, child labor, human smuggling, and female genital mutilation. The project combined a hypothesis-testing comparative case study with process tracing and used expert interviews, content analysis, and network analysis to collect and analyze data. The findings based on our analysis have significantly advanced existing debates on contestation and change in International Organizations. While we observed hardly any formal policy change, we observed variance in the degree of informal policy change in the case studies. However, the openness of international organizations cannot explain the patterns of policy change in our case studies. Instead, a project structure is central to IO policy changes in response to contestation: if IO personnel can rely on earmarked funding and projects that are implemented on the ground, they can respond to the demands of those affected without drawing wide attention from strong status quo defenders. Projects, as all the case studies showed, are a core condition for change, especially in highly controversial policy areas. Where formal decision-making bodies are blocked, IO staff switch to the project level to change IO positions informally. The comparative analysis also showed that the perception of those affected by IO staff is crucial for activating this mechanism. When IO staff perceive stakeholders as legitimate, it becomes a bureaucratic entrepreneur who drives change.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf: Wie das Kontestationsmanagement in internationalen Organisationen Betroffene doppelt selektiert. Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 32(1), 79-98.
Kortendiek, Nele; Zimmermann, Lisbeth & Young, Lily
