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Shadow bureaucracies and the unilateral control of international secretariats: Insights from UN peacekeeping

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Abstract

While formal decision power in most international organizations rests with the member states, the member states often delegate the preparation of decisions to international secretariats. To prepare decisions, secretariats gather and analyze information and subsequently provide the member states with an assessment on the alternative courses of action. In this process, secretariats may accumulate an information surplus over the member states. They can use this advantage to suggest options close to their own interests. This article argues that, to counter such agency problem, the member states unilaterally invest in shadow bureaucracies with the aim to reduce informational asymmetries. Shadow bureaucracies are, however, costly. Member states have to weigh agency costs against the costs of domestic administrative capability. Strong states with outlier preferences are most likely to invest in shadow bureaucracies. They have most to gain. The use of shadow bureaucracies not only reduces agency costs. It also allows states more control over policy in international organizations. This article uses insights from peacekeeping in the United Nations to illustrate the argument.

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Notes

  1. Feldman et al. present an organizational critique on this economic decision-making model.

  2. See Waterman and Meier (1998) for how principal-agent models work if these assumptions are not met.

  3. The member states acting as a collective principal (Nielson and Tierney 2003) may, in exceptional cases, have the same preferences as the secretariat, yet this does not prevent individual member states from trying to influence the secretariat (Urpelainen 2012).

  4. In addition, secretariats have institutional preferences such as an appetite for larger budgets, more competences and staff (e.g., Vaubel 1986; Pollack 2003; Vaubel et al. 2007; Niskanen 1971).

  5. Some states may have similar preferences as the secretariat. They will thus benefit from secretariat agency and will try to resist collective oversight.

  6. A difference with the model of McCubbins and Schwartz (1984) is that the emphasis in this article is on decision-making rather than implementation. Whereas police-patrols deal with ‘hidden action’, shadow bureaucracies are about uncovering ‘hidden information’ (Arrow 1985).

  7. Panke (2012) finds that within the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Finland, Denmark and Germany lobby institutional actors most. These are strong member states with intensive policy preferences. Shadow bureaucracies require more administrative capacity than lobby activities. It is therefore likely that this finding holds as well in the case of shadow bureaucracies.

  8. Multiple agents can also be beneficial in a domestic context. The US State Department, for example, can use the UN assessment to not fully rely on the Department of Defense.

  9. One of the lessons in the keynote Brahimi report is that the Secretariat should not self-censor and be frank with the Security Council (UN 2000, paragraph 59).

  10. Chapter VI provides a legal basis for the “pacific settlement of disputes”, while Chapter VII is about “action with respect to threat to the peace” (UN 1945).

  11. As South Sudan’s biggest oil importer, China has significantly improved its relations with South Sudan since 2011 and takes an increasingly hands-on approach with regard to security issues. It has even contributed an engineering unit to UNMISS. In 2011, China played however much less of a role in the UN negotatiations.

  12. A direct consequence of the intervention was the establishment of the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA). The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, decided to send some 4,200, mostly Ethiopian, troops to Abyei under UN flag to deter further violence.

  13. The United States did not even informally discuss the draft resolution with the UN officials, who had planned the mission and would have the responsibility to implement the mission (interviews UN officials).

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Acknowledgments

This article was previously presented at workshops in Oxford and Maastricht in December 2013, and at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Salamanca in April 2014. The author wishes to thank Michael W. Bauer, Derek Beach, Mareike Kleine, Duncan Snidal, all other participants at these workshops as well as the two anonymous reviewers and editor for their helpful comments.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement n° [298081].

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  1. Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Hylke Dijkstra

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Dijkstra, H. Shadow bureaucracies and the unilateral control of international secretariats: Insights from UN peacekeeping. Rev Int Organ 10, 23–41 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9203-7

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