Autonomy and Styles of International Public Administrations: Exploring the Relationship between Formal Structures and Behavioural Routines

What is the relationship between the structural autonomy of International Organizations and everyday routines in the organizations’ administration? And how does it affect policy making? The paper addresses a classical question of organizational theory: How structures and formal rules affect administrative behavior and applies it to International Organizations. More specifically, we investigate the linkage between structural autonomy and administrative styles, understood as the standard operating procedures and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies. The paper focuses on the stage of drafting and analyses policy drafting styles of four international organizations. At this stage, international public administrations (IPAs) may have the largest impact (‘actorness’) if they manage to anticipate potential political interferences of members states and other actors and successfully establish and guard a favorable information asymmetry on their side (e.g. IPAs submit very long and complex policy proposals just on time to minimize their principals potential to ex-post control their work). We analyze four IPAs which vary not only strongly in terms of their structural autonomy, but also in their administrative styles.