Fluid International Organisations? Reactions to Civil Society Contestation

How do international organisations (IOs) react to the contestation of their norms and policies by civil society actors? IOs are bureaucratic containers and filter external contestation through their organisational culture and administrative structure. If they change, they do so slowly, the usual argument goes. Accordingly, civil society protest is often taken up rhetorically or procedurally but does not induce a substantial transformation of IO policy. Building on organisational sociology and the sociology of the professions, new research in IO studies challenges this assumption and suggests that IOs are much less ‘closed’ than long assumed and better conceived of as ‘open’ organisations with porous boundaries. Professional networks spanning public and private international organisations compete for jurisdictional control and shape decisively how international issues are understood and addressed. Following this argument, contestation is successful if civil society actors generate support within these networks or become part of them. This paper discusses the limits of existing research on civil society contestation and IO reactions, which mostly refer to IOs as bureaucratic containers. It presents a research design to analyse reactions of three IOs (ILO, UNICEF and UNODC) to contestation in different policy fields to test if IOs are best understood as ‘bureaucratic containers’ or ‘open systems’. These illustrative case studies analyse if IOs have become less bureaucratic and more responsive to civil society input – or whether their increasing ‘openness’ has created a new type of organisational pathology. [Actual authors are: Lisbeth Zimmermann (Zeppelin University) & Nele Kortendiek (HSFK) - lisbeth.zimmermann@zu.de & kortendiek@hsfk.de]