Managers of Global Change: The Influence of International Environmental Bureaucracies (review)

How are we to explain the varying performance of international environmental organizations? For the editors of and contributors to Managers of Global Change, the key is to understand them as bureaucracies. Entities with seemingly similar functions, resources, and general mandates are shown here to yield substantially different outputs and, as a result, differing degrees of influence on the wider field of actors around them. The book's core purpose is to ask what factors make this possible.

Some might find the answer to this question in principal-agent dynamics,¹ or in a sociologically-minded study of organizational cultures.² In this volume, which summarizes the results of a four-year collaborative research program, differences in bureaucratic influence are attributed partly to such familiar variables as the structure of the problem at hand and the specifics of the framework of governance created by states as principals. But the explanation for differing levels of bureaucratic influence is also found to lie to a significant degree in the organizational characteristics of bureaucracies: leadership, structure, culture, and expertise. These organizational differences can be traced, in part, to the state-created governance frameworks that generated an international bureaucracy in the first place. But one of the key messages of the volume is the latitude of international bureaucracies to take that initial endowment of opportunities and constraints in differing directions, and at varying speeds.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the study of the bureaucratic dimensions of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) received substantial attention from scholars in international studies. Unleashed by concepts of complex interdependence, regime theory, and the ideational dimensions of world politics, and borrowing liberally from the sociology of knowledge, a generation of scholars sought to understand organizational behavior, evolution, and performance. Two of the most important works in this tradition, Robert Cox's and Harold Jacobsen's Anatomy of Influence (published in 1973) and Ernst Haas's When Knowledge is Power (published in 1990), bracket the era.³ This line of work fell out of favor in the rationalist/constructivist dust-up of the 1990s, only to be revived more recently by, among others, Michael Barnett's and Martha Finnemore's Rules for the World.⁴

But while Managers of Global Change shares Barnett's & Finnemore's attention to the bureaucratic dimension, it does not share their zest for explaining "pathologies" such as excessive rationalization of procedures, insensitivity to local context, or the democratic deficit in global governance. Instead, the emphasis here is on the role of bureaucracies as functional problem solvers, earnestly (if not always effectively) pursuing mandates of global governance.

Following a useful review of the historical literature, the book's conceptual framework posits the influence of bureaucracies to be a function of three clusters of variables: problem structure; the "polity," or governance framework built around the bureaucracy by states; and organizational characteristics of culture, structure, leadership, and expertise alluded to previously. As the authors take pains to acknowledge, it is the independent variable of impacts that presents the biggest empirical hurdle here. Their response is to eschew a definition of impact in terms of power or effectiveness, preferring to define it as "influence." The concept of influence is further unpacked into three distinct dimensions: output ("the actual activity of the bureaucracy" (p. 41)), outcome (the observable changes in the behavior of actors targeted by the bureaucracies' output), and impact ("changes in economic, social, or ecological parameters that result from the change in actors' behavior" (p. 41)). While providing a useful way of organizing the chapter authors' observations, it is not clear that this framework provides any particular advance in the sticky problem of measuring (or even identifying) effects, about which so much ink has been spilt. More useful is the effort to conceive different mechanisms of influence, including cognitive, normative, and executive—or, as the authors put it, assessing the effects of bureaucracies "as knowledge-brokers, as negotiation-facilitators, and as capacity-builders" (p. 47).

This framework for inquiry is applied to...