Policy recommendations of international bureaucracies: the importance of country-specificity
| Author | Mathies Kempken,Jana Herold,Per-Olof Busch,Hauke Feil,Andrea Liese,Mirko Heinzel |
| DOI | 10.1177/00208523211013385 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Policy recommendations
of international
bureaucracies:
the importance of
country-specificity
Per-Olof Busch
Adelphi, Germany
Hauke Feil
University of Potsdam, Germany
Mirko Heinzel
University of Potsdam, Germany
Jana Herold
University of Potsdam, Germany
Mathies Kempken
University of Potsdam, Germany
Andrea Liese
University of Potsdam, Germany
Abstract
Many international bureaucracies give policy advice to national administrative units.
Why is the advice given by some international bureaucracies more influential than
the recommendations of others? We argue that targeting advice to member states
through national embeddedness and country-tailored research increases the influence
of policy advice. Subsequently, we test how these characteristics shape the relative
Corresponding author:
Mirko Heinzel, University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Straße 89, Potsdam 14469, Germany.
Email: mheinzel@uni-potsdam.de
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00208523211013385
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2021, Vol. 87(4) 775–793
influence of 15 international bureaucracies’ advice in four financial policy areas through
a global survey of national administrations from more than 80 countries. Our findings
support arguments that global blueprints need to be adapted and translated to become
meaningful for country-level work.
Points for practitioners
National administrations are advised by an increasing number of international bureau-
cracies, and they cannot listen to all of this advice. Whereas some international bureau-
cracies give ‘one-size-fits-all’ recommendations to rather diverse countries, others
cater their recommendations to the national audience. Investigating financial policy
recommendations, we find that national embeddedness and country-tailored advice
render international bureaucracies more influential.
Keywords
financial policy, international administration, international organizations, multi-level gov-
ernment, regime complexity
Introduction
1
Many international bureaucracies give policy advice to national decision-makers.
The influence of such advice has increasingly been recognized in academic debates
on international organizations (IOs) (Edwards and Senger, 2015; Fang and Stone,
2012; Heinzel and Liese, 2021a; Kudrle, 2014; Momani, 2007). Scholarship has
demonstrated that individual international bureaucracies’ advice can affect the
decisions taken by national actors even in the absence of more coercive means
of policy transfer, like conditionality. However, the literature lacks comparative
analyses that explain why some international bureaucracies are more successful in
transferring policies through their advice than others.
Yet, such comparative approaches are ever-more relevant because internation-
al bureaucracies are part of complex and overlapping international regimes
(Gehring and Faude, 2014; Kreuder-Sonnen and Zu
¨rn, 2020; Zelli and van
Asselt, 2013). Therefore, national decision-makers are often not faced with iso-
lated advice by one international bureaucracy alone, but have to decide whose
advice is worthy of consideration and whose they want to ignore. Therefore, we
ask: why is the advice given by some international bureaucracies more influential
than the advice of others?
To explain differential consideration of international bureaucracies’ policy
advice, we develop an argument based on the literature on IO policy advice and
institutional overlap. Many international bureaucracies succumb to bureaucratic
universalism by relying on general solutions in diverse national contexts (Barnett
and Finnemore, 1999). Increasing institutional overlap creates windows of
776 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(4)
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