International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction
| DOI | 10.1177/00208523211038730 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir,Steffen Eckhard,Ronny Patz |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
International bureaucracy
and the United Nations
system: introduction
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
Ronny Patz
Hertie School, Germany
Steffen Eckhard
University of Konstanz, Germany
Abstract
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 administra-
tions. 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.
Keywords
international bureaucracy, international public administration, United Nations
Corresponding author:
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir, Faculty of Social Sciences, Geschwister-Scholl-Institut (GSI) for Political Science,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich, Office: G102, Oettingenstrasse 67, Munchen, Bayern 80538,
Germany.
Email: thorvaldsdottir@gsi.lmu.de
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2021, Vol. 87(4) 695–700
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00208523211038730
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