Mandate or Donors? Explaining the UNHCR’s Country-Level Expenditures from 1967 to 2016
| Author | Ronny Patz,Klaus H Goetz,Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720974330 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720974330
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(2) 443 –464
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720974330
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Mandate or Donors? Explaining
the UNHCR’s Country-Level
Expenditures from 1967 to 2016
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir1,
Ronny Patz1,2 and Klaus H Goetz1
Abstract
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.
Keywords
United Nations, international organizations, refugees, United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees, multilateral aid
Accepted: 29 September 2020
Introduction
Refugee crises in recent years, especially the Syria crisis, have brought global attention to
many of the international actors charged with protecting refugees and with managing and
1Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, München, Germany
2Hertie School, Berlin, Germany
Corresponding author:
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir, LMU Munich, Geschwister-Scholl-Institut of Political Science (GSI), Oettingenstr.
67. 80538, Munich, Germany.
Email: thorvaldsdottir@gsi.lmu.de
974330PSX0010.1177/0032321720974330Political StudiesThorvaldsdottir et al.
research-article2021
Article
444 Political Studies 70(2)
supporting displaced populations. At the forefront of this protection effort today as well
as for the past decades has been the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR). The organization is mandated with serving the world’s almost 71 million for-
cibly displaced people, an effort for which the organization budgeted USD 8.6 billion in
2019. However, financing this aspirational budget is not guaranteed, and political leaders
like Germany’s Angela Merkel have remarked on numerous occasions that underfunding
of the agency’s work in the early years of the Syria crisis resulted in the 2015 large-scale
arrival of refugees to Europe.
The dynamics of UNHCR financing around the Syria crisis point to a broader question
of international organization (IO) financing and its consequences. Like many United
Nations (UN) agencies, UNHCR depends almost entirely on voluntary support. In 2019,
87% of the organization’s funding came from voluntary contributions from governmental
donors (including European Union (EU) funding), 80% of which came from the top 10
donors. Similar donation patterns are observed in many other agencies, e.g., the World
Health Organization (WHO). Just like WHO’s funding is in focus at present, UNHCR’s
dependence on voluntary funding has led to the criticism that it might be “formulating its
refugee policies in line with donor, rather than refugee, interests” (Cunliffe, 1995: 289).
This is not a trivial charge, and understanding its implications in the context of some of
the most vulnerable populations in the world is of fundamental importance.
Questions about donor bias in IOs are not unique to UNHCR. They have been asked
both in the context of bilateral (Alesina and Dollar, 2000; McKinley and Little, 1979) and
multilateral (cf. Graham, 2017b) aid allocation. Although the general consensus in this
literature is that IO finances are intricately linked to state interests, we still know rela-
tively little about the degree to which donor decisions directly influence IOs’ financial
and operational activities and, crucially, whether such donor influence undermines IOs’
ability to serve recipient needs and multilateral mandates. Research on UNHCR itself has
yielded contradictory insights in this regard. While some argue that it clearly follows US
and Western donors’ interests (Betts, 2003; Roper and Barria, 2010; Väyrynen, 2001),
others see a strong mandate-oriented IO that is much less donor oriented than many other
agencies, such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM; Hall, 2016).
This article contributes to these debates through the use of novel data connecting donor
preferences and recipient needs to empirically investigate the extent to which UNHCR’s
geographical allocation of resources is in line with refugee needs, and under what condi-
tions donor interest influences this allocation. The analysis is based on an original dataset
comprising, first, state contributions to UNHCR and, second, the country-level expendi-
tures of the organization during the period from 1967 to 2016. This dataset provides an
unusually rich view of the organization and allows us to study donor influence and man-
date delivery over an extended time period. Adapting a recently introduced measure to
capture donor interest and ability to influence IOs, we also introduce three originally
calculated “influence-weighted interest scores” (IWIS) that tap into the various types of
donor interests, notably geographic, political, and economic considerations that they may
have when trying to influence UNHCR.
Encouragingly, our findings demonstrate an enduring ability of UNHCR to allocate its
country-level spending in line with its core mandate, responding to shifts in refugee popu-
lations across the world. This finding is robust throughout the history of the organization,
even in recent decades when donors have reportedly become more demanding and con-
trolling through tighter earmarking of funding. In fact, our donor interest measurements
suggest the lack of a clear link between bilateral donor interest and aid allocation by
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