Ronny Patz

International organizations (IOs) with permanent bureaucracies depend on funding and staff. But what do IO bureaucracies do when governments repeatedly fail to adopt a budget? Building on recent debates on IO resourcing and the role of IO bureaucracies in global policymaking, this article argues that international bureaucracies act entrepreneurially during budget crises but that conflict among states places constraints on entrepreneurialism. We explore constrained entrepreneurialism by studying the Organization for Security and Co‐operation in Europe (OSCE), focusing on the period after 2022, when the organization was operating without a regular budget due to the fallout from Russia's full‐scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on 80 interviews with OSCE officials and national diplomats, our findings show that while the OSCE bureaucracy engaged in entrepreneurial practices to sustain core operations and mobilize resources, deadlock between Russia and Ukraine's supporters, coupled with the OSCE's strict consensus rule, placed severe constraints on these efforts.

This paper examines the OSCE’s resourcing from a comparative perspective. The OSCE has distinctive features, but its challenges are not unique among international organizations (IOs). Most notable is the hard consensus rule for all OSCE decision-making, which promotes OSCE Unified Budget incrementalism, undermines budgeting routinization, and challenges financial management. In addition, while the OSCE receives earmarked funding from donors, the share of extrabudgetary funding is smaller than in many other IOs. Instead, the OSCE relies heavily on seconded staff as in-kind contributions. Finally, the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine deployed in 2014 demonstrated potentials and risks for future OSCE financing. This contribution concludes with three recommendations: the introduction of a consensus-oriented integrated budgeting process in the OSCE, the development of a centralized resource mobilization function in the OSCE Secretariat, and greater attention to the lessons of the SMM for the future of OSCE resourcing.

Budgeting and resourcing are fundamental to every larger public organisation. Budgeting is concerned with identifying and determining the financial resources available to the organisation; and with deciding on levels of expenditure and on the allocation of funds to particular tasks and specific expenditure categories, such as personnel, physical infrastructure, or running costs. Resourcing is about ensuring that the organisation disposes of the funds necessary to carry out its tasks and is able to employ these resources for the budgeted purposes and at the time when they are needed.

Les rapports annuels sont un élément central dans la communication de la responsabilité des bureaucraties internationales aux États membres et aux autres parties prenantes. La plupart des bureaucraties du système des Nations unies produisent des rapports très longs et détaillés. Les agences internationales se servent de ces rapports pour attirer l’attention sur différents défis ou réalisations. Il est essentiel de trouver le ton juste à adopter pour communiquer avec leurs diverses parties prenantes en vue de conserver leur appui. Pour ce faire, les agences de l’ONU emploient un langage différencié, composé d’un mélange de sentiments et d’informations factuelles. Nous soutenons que l’orientation opérationnelle, les structures administratives et les besoins de mobilisation des ressources des agences ont un impact significatif sur la manière dont elles utilisent les sentiments pour communiquer avec les différents groupes de parties prenantes. Nous nous appuyons sur une analyse des sentiments basée sur le dictionnaire de trois corpus de textes de rapports annuels produits par trois agences du système des Nations unies – l’UNRWA (rapports publiés de 1951 à 2019), le HCR (1953-2019) et l’OIM (2000-2019) – pour mettre en évidence une tendance générale à l’augmentation du recours aux sentiments positifs dans les trois agences, qui coïncide avec une période de renforcement du souci pour les donateurs. En parallèle, nous observons une utilisation plus volatile et propre aux agences du sentiment négatif en réponse aux défis sur le terrain qui sont communiqués aux parties prenantes conformément à l’évolution des mandats des agences. Grâce à une perspective fondée sur le texte en tant que données, la présente contribution améliore notre compréhension comparative du langage diversifié et dépendant du contexte des bureaucraties internationales. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens En lisant les rapports des agences de l’ONU, les praticiens doivent être conscients des contraintes et des incitations auxquelles les bureaucrates internationaux sont confrontés – notamment l’orientation opérationnelle, les structures administratives et les besoins en ressources – qui entraînent des différences de ton entre les rapports et dans le temps.

Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

Annual reports are a central element of international bureaucracies' accountability communication to member states and other stakeholders. Most UN system bureaucracies produce reports of significant length and detail. International agencies use these reports to draw attention to particular challenges or successes. Hitting the right tone with their diverse stakeholders is crucial to maintain continued support. UN agencies do so by employing differentiated sentiment-loaded language alongside factual reporting. We argue that agencies' operational focus, administrative structures and resource mobilization needs have a significant impact on how they use sentiment to communicate with different stakeholder groups. Drawing on a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of three text corpora of annual reports produced by three UN system agencies—UNRWA (reports published from 1951 to 2019), UNHCR (1953–2019) and IOM (2000–2019)—we show a general trend toward increased positive sentiment use across all three agencies, coinciding with a period of stronger donor orientation. At the same time, we find a more volatile and agency-specific use of negative sentiment in response to field-level challenges that are communicated to stakeholders in line with agencies' evolving mandates. Through a text-as-data perspective, this contribution enhances our comparative understanding of the diverse and context-dependent language of international bureaucracies. Points for practitioners: Reading UN agency reporting, practitioners need to be aware of the constraints and incentives that international bureaucrats face—notably operational focus, administrative structures and resource needs—that drive tone differences across reports and over time.

This contribution theorizes on the emergence of affective styles in the accountability reporting of public agencies. Under conditions of multiple accountability towards heterogeneous stakeholders, public agencies are expected to make increased use of sentiment in their reporting. Agencies’ differentiated modulation of positive and negative sentiment results in four ideal-typical affective styles: technocratic, political, alarming, and self-praising. The plausibility of this framework is demonstrated for the case of a major international public agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which serves several million Palestine refugees. We conduct a dictionary-based sentiment analysis of UNRWA annual reports published between 1951 and 2020, a corpus of 1.47 million words. Additional evidence from interviews with UNRWA officials and diplomats is also considered. Over time, the agency’s use of sentiment has increased in response to diversifying stakeholders and its affective style of reporting has changed repeatedly. Contrary to established theoretical expectations, multiple accountability not only increases positive reporting and self-praise. Rather, with increasing levels of negativity, the alarming and political styles of communication have played a much stronger role. These findings demonstrate that agencies’ chief goal in accountability reporting is not simply to elicit positive assessments from their respective accountability forums through self-praising language. Agencies may also aim to achieve “negativity congruence” with accountability forums by increasing negative sentiment, thus compelling stakeholders to acknowledge the operational challenges agencies face.