International Bureaucracies in Difficult Times: Trust Re-Building Strategies

The United States (US) recently voiced heavy criticism against international organizations (IOs) in an open approach to affect their behavior. For instance, the US criticized the United Nations for being inefficient, NATO unfair, and the World Trade Organization for serving China. This is in contrast with the practice of traditional great powers exercising informal influence behind-the-scenes. Such a fierce public criticism from a powerful member state significantly threatens IO bureaucracies, or international public administrations (IPAs), as it targets the fundamental basis of IPA’s trustworthiness. Yet, research on IPAs’ responsiveness in this context remains scarce. Hence, this paper examines how IPAs react to great powers’ demands and explains why their strategies vary. In particular, we argue that different bureaucratic styles (Knill et al. 2018) lead to different strategies of re-building trust: (i) servant IPAs presume a reactive and instrumental behavioral orientation and thus tend to passively engage in the issue at hand, avoiding any disagreement with the member states; (ii) entrepreneurial IPAs presume opportunistic and policy advocacy oriented behavior and thus tend to actively engage in the issue, even if risking a clash with the member states. We trace IPAs’ trust-rebuilding strategies across four IOs that have all been challenged by the Trump administration: UNESCO and NATO (servants) as well as UNHCR and World Bank (entrepreneurs). Empirically, we draw on expert interviews with IPA officials as well as qualitative content analysis of IO accounts. The findings of this paper offer theoretical implications as to when IPAs are more likely to preserve their trustworthiness and avoid an increase in control (e.g. sanctioning). This, in turn, sheds more light on a latent variable of member states-IPA relationship and contributes to IO research in general and IPA literature in specific.