A Matter of Routine? Administrative Styles in International Organisations

With the growing importance of international institutions for global governance, global politics becomes more and more public policy-making. As we know from comparative public policy, bureaucracies contribute to a considerable degree to the contents and the ways of policy-making. One important driver are the specific “styles” or “cultures” of policy-making which involve political as well as administrative actors. “Administrative styles” are understood here as the standard operating procedures and routines characterizing the behavior and activities of administrative bodies in the context of various structural constraints. Administrative styles refer to specific patterns of policy initiation, decision-making and patterns of implementation. The study of administrative styles is important for the comparative research on policy-making as they can explain unanticipated variance in policy-making and implementation, making some policy-options more likely than others or even ruling some options out. There are only few hints in international research on international bureaucracies dealing with these fundamental questions. The peculiarities of international bureaucracies make up several interesting puzzles for research: Contrary to their national counterparts, international organisations are rather young, influenced by actors socialized in different national traditions and most notably governed by multiple principals. Whether certain national styles can permeate the bureaucracies, whether more or less functional mixtures develop, or whether a new “global” administrative style is in the making remains an open question so far. With a comparative approach of organizational characteristics and empirical evidence from three fields of action (environment, financial regulation, migration), the paper aims to develop (1) a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of administrative styles (2) a theoretically-guided empirical yardstick for analyzing the variety of administrative styles of international bureaucracies, (3) explores patterns of empirically observed administrative styles and (4) ventures some preliminary analysis on the impact of administrative styles in carefully selected cases of policy-making.