The Design of International Organisations

International organizations plays a crucial role in global governance. However, the design of these organizations varies considerably depending on area of responsibility, membership and size of their secretariats. Some international organizations are contested because of their influence, while others provide public goods without receiving any attention. What many of them have in common is that they are meta-organizations, which means that they have other organizations as members, often states. These organizations represent a special form of decided order, including one or more of the elements of member¬ship, hierarchy, rules, monitoring and sanctions (Ahrne and Brunsson 2010). Coordination between the meta-organization and member states is a key challenge for meta-organizations, and negotiations is the preferential method for coordination. The design of an international organization is therefor often under continues negotiation. Thus, in order to understand the current situation for 21st international bureaucracies we will analyze ongoing discussions about the organizational design of three important organizations: the World Health Organization (WHO), the secretariat of the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The paper ask how recent changes in global governance, especially the anti-multilateralism positions promoted by many countries, influence the ideational foundation for these organizations. Are these three organizations facing the same challenges of organizational design and discussing the same types of organizational change (c.f. isomorphism), or, alternatively, is organizational development characterized by their respective policy-contexts and their unique historical “paths”? Further, we explore the organizational characteristics, which are most resilient, and those characteristics which are most challenged by recent changes in international relations. Finally, we discuss the implications of the observations for our understanding of change and development in the design of international organizations. We address these questions by analysing data from the WHO, the UNFCCC and the WTO.