Theorising Bureaucratic Policy Influence in International Organisations: A Condition-Based Approach

International Public Administrations (IPAs), embodied within the secretariats of international organizations (IOs), receive increasing scholarly attention. The challenge is, however, to develop systematic analytical research strategies to determine international bureaucratic influence—especially with view to how IPAs influence policy making. This paper outlines a proposal on how such “policy influence” of IPAs can be conceived and systematically explained. It focuses on a condition-based approach to policy influence that emphasizes ex-ante preference identification of bureaucratic actors as well as functional, power-related and intra-bureaucratic explanations. Particular care is taken to select relevant cases—examples of policy decisions within four IOs, i.e. UNESCO, ILO, FAO and WHO—in order to study the extent to which bureaucratic influence can be observed. It is concluded that condition-based and mechanism-based influence studies are best combined in a sequential way to establish the when and how of international bureaucratic influence. While we are only able to illustrate empirically the added value of the suggested condition-based approach as one side of this story, it is argued that the analytical distinctions developed and the selection procedure for policy events proposed are crucial to advance the applied empirical study of IPAs influence on policy making.