Measuring the Empowerment of International Organizations: The Evolution of Financial and Staff Capabilities
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| Author | Henning Schmidtke,Eugénia Heldt |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12449 |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
Measuring the Empowerment of International
Organizations: The Evolution of Financial and
Staff Capabilities
Eug
enia Heldt and Henning Schmidtke
Bavarian School of Public Policy, TUM School of Governance, Technical University of Munich
Abstract
International organizations’(IOs) power in shaping global governance outcomes is not only determined by the formal delega-
tion of tasks and issue areas but also by the necessary capabilities to fulfill these tasks. Yet, extant research on the delegation
of power to IOs gives few insights into the financial and staff capabilities of IOs and focuses mainly on the formal rules that
specify IOs’tasks and issue scope. To address these limitations, this paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a more
encompassing concept of IO power which incorporates three principal components: tasks, issue scope, and capabilities. Sec-
ond, we introduce a new concept –IO empowerment (IOE) –which encapsulates formal and informal changes in IO power
over time. Third, we introduce a novel dataset on IO capabilities, which measures the formal rules governing IO staff and
financial resources as well as the actual capabilities available to six well-known IOs over 65 years. These original data show
that capabilities vary not only across IOs but also over time.
Policy Implications
•The power of international organizations has three principal components: tasks; issue scope; and capabilities.
•When the number of issue areas delegated to IOs grows and when the type of issue areas become more intrusive, IO
power increases.
•The more financial resources are available to an IO, the higher the organization’s power.
•IOs may strategically use financial and human resources at their disposal to empower themselves over time.
The growing importance of international organizations (IOs)
has caused scholars to focus their attention on how power
is delegated to IOs and what shapes IOs’power to affect
global governance outcomes. We have learned quite a bit
about why states decide to delegate power to IOs (Abbott
and Snidal, 1998; Hawkins et al., 2006; Pollack, 2003), how
states choose institutional designs (Bradley and Kelley, 2008;
Jupille et al., 2013; Koremenos et al., 2001), which control
mechanisms mediate principal-agent (henceforth, PA) rela-
tionships (Graham, 2014; Grigorescu, 2010; Johnson, 2014),
and what consequences result from transferring tasks to IOs
(Conceicß
~
ao-Heldt, 2010; Tallberg, 2002; Z€
urn et al., 2012).
The respective empirical analyses of IOs’formal institutional
designs (Hooghe and Marks, 2015; Lipscy, 2015) have con-
tributed to a growing understanding of what shapes IOs’
ability to affect global governance outcomes.
In contrast, the capabilities of IOs to perform the tasks
formally delegated to them in different issue areas –the
focus of this special issue and our contribution –have
received considerably less attention (Goetz and Patz, 2017).
Capabilities refer in this piece to the financial and human
resources available to an IO. Many International Relations
(IR) scholars simply assume that IO financial resources and
staff are limited and that they are subject to close member
state oversight (see, for instance, Abbott et al., 2015; Abbott
and Snidal, 1998; Barnett and Finnemore, 2004). This broad
assumption is striking because IOs’power to shape global
governance outcomes is clearly contingent on their financial
and staff capabilities (Brown, 2010; Graham, 2015; Par
ızek,
2016). As Amerasinghe (2005, p. 352) argues: ‘Financing is at
the heart of the functioning of international organizations.
Without adequate funds they could not achieve their pur-
poses and functions’. Along these lines, Eckhardt and Dijk-
stra (2017) demonstrate how IO budgets shape the
implementation of international policies; Abbott et al. (2015)
show that IOs’material resources affect the extent to which
they cooperate with intermediary actors to achieve their
governance targets; Graham (2017) highlights how different
methods of funding shape the nature of IO governance; Ege
and Bauer (2017) investigate how different financial sources
affect IO autonomy; and Squatrito (2017) examines the
resource management design of international courts. Simi-
larly, research focusing on IOs as bureaucracies (Trondal
et al., 2010) has demonstrated how international bureau-
crats shape IOs’institutional design (Johnson, 2014), behav-
ior (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004), and policy output
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.5 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12449 ©2017 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 5 . August 2017 51
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