Politicians and Bureaucrats in Times of Globalisation: Public Service Bargains and International Governance

With today’s most pressing challenges, such as migration and climate change, being transboundary problems, we witness the flourishing of new modes of global governance. In order to address the collective action problems that transboundary problems present, national states become highly involved in international public administrations (IPAs) and transgovernmental networks (TGNs). A question that haunts political scientists and public administration scholars is whether, in the light of globalization processes, we are also witnessing the end of the national state as the most important venue for political, legal and administrative decision-making. Do the traditional powers of the state disappear to these new modes of global governance? Are the political-administrative relationships at the center of state decision-making being replaced by other and different political-bureaucratic bargains? This paper examines the effects of globalization on national states by looking closer at the changing political-administrative relations. The emergence of international and transnational administrations has fundamentally altered the structure and organizations of national states’ bureaucracies. It has led to new “public service bargains” being forged between politicians and their civil servants. These new “bargains” are at the basis of a national state apparatus that is densely interconnected with IPAs and TGNs and allow the national states to maintain a central role in addressing the most important problems of the 21st century.