Budgeting in International Organisations: What Role for Administrations?

Budgeting is one of the most complex procedures in international organisations (IOs): it is multi-level, in that it concerns both the IO and the member-states that provide all or part of the budget through their contributions; it is multi-institutional, in that it involves both the administrative and the political bodies of IOs; it is multi-sectoral, in that it affects all policy-related activities of IOs; it is multi-layered, in that it involves different administrative and political levels in IOs; and it is multi-temporal, in that it operates with differentiated time horizons and differentiated rules for different parts of the budget. As a result of this procedural complexity, the rules and practices governing budgeting in IOs allow important insights into their organisational characteristics. This paper focuses on the role of the administrative parts of IOs in budgeting. It is especially interested in degrees of administrative autonomy and centralisation. What degree of autonomy do administrations enjoy from political bodies when it comes to budgeting? And what degree of administrative centralisation do we find in budgeting? The paper, first, introduces budgeting as an empirical focus through which organisational processes and structures in international administrations can be understood. Second, it reviews previous scholarship on budgeting and IOs. Against this background, the paper, in a third step, sets out an analytical framework for the comparative analysis of budgeting in IOs and the roles of administrations. In its main fourth part, the paper provides a detailed analysis of budgeting in the EU, drawing on a wealth of original empirical material collected by the authors. The concluding section sets out how insights gained from the EU case may help to inform further comparative efforts across a range of IOs.