Policy implementation by international public administrations: OSCE and EU peace operations in post-war Kosovo

Conceptualizing international organizations as international public administrations (IPA), this paper elaborates on the impact of agencies’ institutional design on their regulatory performance. Previous research in public administration and security governance remains split on this question. Some authors in both fields favor bottom-up or street-level approaches while others adhere to the top-down or centralization thesis. Modifying Matland’s synthesizing implementation theory, this paper argues that two policy characteristics force the implementation process in different directions: the degree of political conflict among principals, and the extent to which IPAs need to align international policy objectives to the local context. Depending on these characteristics, different institutional designs render positive performance more or less likely. Solidifying this claim, the paper presents comparative research on OSCE and EU peace operations in post-war Kosovo. Operating in a similar environment, these IPAs differ with respect to both their institutional designs and their regulatory performance. Ruling out a number of potential alternative explanations, the paper concludes that variation in institutional designs counts as the chief reason.