IOs ‘Going Public’? Communication Policies, Resources and Structures of International Organisations in a Comparative Perspective

In the wake of increased levels and scope of global governance, most IR scholarship has focused the political agency of International Organizations (IOs) as well as its politicization, that is, how IOs become salient and controversial objects of public attitudes and debates. However, IOs’ role as active agents in the public realms has been a peripheral concern of research at best. This is surprising, given that member states tend to define it an important task and IOs’ standard institutional template consequently entails some sort of press office or public information department. What is more, we seem to witness a remarkable trend of IOs to “go public” by intensifying public communication activities including the professionalization of strategies, administrative structures, resources and output. This trend could be of an enormous relevance for understanding the current state and possible futures of global governance. In the context of normative debates about IOs’ desirable role as cores of a legitimate global order, it is widely held that enhancing IOs’ capacity for public communication is necessary to foster public accountability. However, the opposite might be true as well: respective IOs might increasingly be capable to avoid public accountability by pro-actively capturing public debates and marginalizing critics. Against this backdrop, the proposed paper tries to do some groundwork. First, it conceptualizes public communication as an organizational practice that is a multidimensional phenomenon in terms of IOs’ communication strategies, structures, resources, and output. Second, it presents and discusses unpublished time-series-cross-section data on public communication practices of 30 IOs. Third, the paper seeks to shed light on causal mechanisms. To this end, it will present first evidence for the functioning of three causal mechanisms – diffusion of a transparency norm, changing mandates for governance, self-legitimation facing politicization.