Suchergebnisse

International organizations (IOs) have moved increasingly in recent years to adopt cross-cutting mandates that require the "mainstreaming" of particular issues, such as gender equality or environmental protection, across all IO policies. Successful IO performance with respect to such mandates, we hypothesize, is determined in large part by the use of hard or soft institutional measures to shape the incentives of sectoral officials whose cooperation is required for successful implementation. We test this hypothesis with respect to two such mandates—gender mainstreaming and environmental policy integration—in a single international organization, the European Union, demonstrating a strong causal link between the use of hard incentives and IO performance in these and related mandates.

Over the past two decades, human rights language has spread like wildfire across international policy arenas. The activists who sparked this fire are engaged in two different campaigns. The first is comparatively modest, involving the persuasion of tens of thousands of global elites such as journalists, UN officials, donors, and national political leaders. The second is broader and more complex: to have a real impact on the behavior of tens of millions of state agents worldwide. While most international relations scholars agree that the first campaign has made real gains, opinions are split on the success—past, present, and future—of the second. In part, these divisions fall along methodological lines. With some exceptions, qualitative scholars working in the empirical international relations tradition express more optimism than their quantitative counterparts, whose contributions to the subfield are relatively new. This article reviews several new books on human rights and shows how their insights engage with these ongoing methodological debates. The authors argue that both qualitative and quantitative approaches offer important strengths and that neither has a monopoly on truth. Still, the human rights discourse may be thriving, at least in part, for reasons unrelated to impact. The authors conclude with suggestions for a more systematic and multimethod research, along with a plea for scholarly attention to the potential downsides of international human rights promotion.