Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir

When do states like Iceland finance international organizations (IOs) to carry out tasks that could, in principle, be handled domestically? This paper addresses this question through an analysis of Nordic states’ financing of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) between 1993 and 2024. While existing literature emphasizes donor states seeking influence over IO agendas or how donors balance strategic vs norm-driven considerations in multilateral aid giving, less attention has been paid to the use of IOs as substitutes for, or complements to, national administrative capacity. To investigate this dimension, the paper draws on an original dataset constructed from systematically coded IOM financial reports, including material obtained through archival requests. The analysis shows that Nordic states overwhelmingly rely on project-based funding with a significant share directed toward operational tasks such as assisted return that are important to national governments. Data shows that the Nordic countries differ significantly, both in terms of the number of projects and geographical distribution of funding. Iceland is distinct as it almost exclusively finances domestic projects compared to the more mixed portfolios of the other Nordics. This outsourcing of administrative capacity does not appear to be purely temporary, as demonstrated by a case study of Iceland, which delegates core migration administration to IOM. These patterns reveal that even high-capacity and norm-driven donors use IOM for domestic projects. The study contributes to scholarship on IO financing by demonstrating how international organizations can serve as instruments of domestic governance and showing how this can play out in high-capacity states.

Many international organizations (IOs) rely on voluntary contributions from member states and private actors to fund their operations. Donations from individuals are a significant and increasing income source for these IOs, who rely on marketing strategies such as celebrity endorsement, in the form of Goodwill Ambassadors, to help raise funds. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of this strategy in the context of IOs although intuition from literatures in marketing and psychology suggests that celebrity endorsement should be effective. We conduct a survey experiment to investigate the effectiveness of Goodwill Ambassadors and, contrary to expectations, find no average effect of celebrity endorsement on donations to, and interest in, IOs and only limited effects among certain sub-groups. We speculate that the context of IOs makes it harder to generate the type of connection between celebrity and cause necessary to make endorsement effective and suggest that further investigation is needed.

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.

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.

In recent decades, many international organizations have become almost entirely funded by voluntary contributions. Much existing literature suggests that major donors use their funding to refocus international organizations’ attention away from their core mandate and toward serving donors’ geostrategic interests. We investigate this claim in the context of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), examining whether donor influence negatively impacts mandate delivery and leads the organization to direct expenditures more toward recipient countries that are politically, economically, or geographically salient to major donors. Analyzing a new dataset of UNHCR finances (1967–2016), we find that UNHCR served its global mandate with considerable consistency. Applying flexible measures of collective donor influence, so-called “influence-weighted interest scores,” our findings suggest that donor influence matters for the expenditure allocation of the agency, but that mandate-undermining effects of such influence are limited and most pronounced during salient refugee situations within Europe.