The Return of the Repressed: the United Nation’s Administrative and Budget Committee as a Site of Resistance

While there has been an increase in attention to the role of budgeting in research on international organizations, the function of administrative and budgetary committees - beyond resource allocation - as sites for policy making is less well understood. In the United Nations Secretariat, for example, since both the programmatic results frameworks and the budgets must be agreed by all member states in the General Assembly’s budget committee by consensus, this process allows for interests that are excluded in one forum – notably the Security Council – to be pursued in seemingly technical negotiations over administrative and budgetary issues. This paper will highlight the processes and practices of United Nation’s Administrative and Budgetary (Fifth) Committee, illustrating how smaller and less powerful states can obstruct, revise and sometimes drive policy, in opposition to the priorities of both the dominant financial contributors and the UN administration. The focus of the paper will be on human resources policies where the Fifth Committee has a norm-setting role through agreeing the framework and conditions of service for all UN system staff. The paper will draw on a detailed analysis of member state position statements on the human resources agenda item in the Fifth committee since 2013; summary records of meetings; and UN human resources resolutions, as well interviews with UN staff and diplomats in the Fifth Committee, to highlight how the administrative and budgetary process reveals significant ideational cleavages among and between member states and the administration about what the Organization should be doing and how. The analysis will also suggest that conflicts over administrative policy limit both the autonomy of the UN administration as well as the power of dominant states, in particular regarding the structure and composition of UN peace operations. By considering the budget committees as sites of administrative politics where conflicting ideologies of management and approaches to bureaucracy play out, this paper will contribute to the emerging work on administrative governance in international organizations. In concentrating on the different member state perspectives on human resources and what and who staff should represent, it will also apply insights from theories of representative bureaucracy regarding the claims that are made about the importance of IO representativeness.