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International organizations (IOs) are driven by political-administrative interactions between member states and IO administrations. To model these interactions and understand their outcomes, scholars have predominantly, and almost exclusively, relied on agency theory. Yet, as this paper argues, delegation can also take a form of stewardship, where goal conflict and information asymmetries are low. In stewardship relationships, member states trust the IO administration, which enables softer, more informal exercise of control. Both agency and stewardship relationships are illustrated in a comparative case study of FAO and WFP. As interview data and document analysis show, while FAO exhibits agency, WFP provides an example for stewardship. The findings imply that conventional Principal-Agent assumptions should not be taken as given. Not all IO administrations are self-serving agents. The findings also provide implications on IO control and performance and call for scholarship to redirect its focus on de facto rather than de jure IO characteristics.

This book explores the internal machinery of evaluation systems in international organizations and challenges the conventional understanding of evaluation as a value-free activity. The authors propose new ways of better reconciling evaluation politics with the need to gather reliable evidence to improve the functioning of the United Nations.

AbstractDespite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders indeed realize ex-ante political interests through evaluations. This is, however, especially important considering the booming business of evaluation and the proliferation of institutional assessments both in domestic and international politics. We argue that formally independent IO evaluation units informally orientate towards either member states or the IO administration, depending on who controls the unit's budget, staff, and agenda resources. This should enable either actor to also use evaluation results along pre-defined strategic interests. Interview data gathered among evaluators, secretariat officials, and member state representatives of six IOs support the expected pattern, highlighting striking differences in the orientation of evaluation staff and evaluation use. Findings challenge the technocratic, apolitical image of evaluation, offering practical and theoretical implications for future research.

While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international public administrations in 24 United Nations organizations. We find that the administration—and not member states—have the largest influence potential in almost two-thirds of the international organizations. Our findings allow classifying them into three groups for which we expect differences in political contestation about evaluation use: two extreme-case groups (either member state or administrative dominance) and a group of contested middle cases. This finding of bureaucratic dominance reinforces literature on bureaucrats as powerful evaluation stakeholders in domestic settings and speaks to nascent research on bureaucratic influence in international organizations.

The functioning of modern societies increasingly depends on secure cyberspace. Given states' lacking capacities to protect this novel domain, governments draw on a variety of third parties for support. Yet, they face a challenge. While imposed control may limit third parties' competence, the abandonment of hierarchical control contradicts the widespread notion of national security. How do states navigate between these functional and national security imperatives to design governance arrangements? We develop a typology that combines cybersecurity problems (risks vs. threats) with governance modes (delegation vs. orchestration). This helps us to explore more than 100 cybersecurity policies across 15 different states. We find one predominant pattern. Governments delegate authority but maintain elements of hierarchical control, when they respond to threatening attacks. In contrast, governments orchestrate intermediaries by soft inducements to address risks and diffuse vulnerabilities in cyberspace. This contributes to both indirect governance scholarship and the debate on cybersecurity.

AbstractGovernments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizations (IOs) of the United Nations system. We use deep learning to measure the share of positive assessments at the sentence level per evaluation report as a proxy for the positivity of evaluation results. Analyzing 1082 evaluation reports, we find that reports commissioned by operative units, as compared to central evaluation units, systematically contain more positive assessments. Theoretically, this link between institutional design choices and evaluation outcomes may explain why policymakers perceive similar tools for evidence‐based policymaking as functional in some organizations, and politicized in others.

AbstractPrincipal‐agent theorizing is based on the idea of a linear inverse relationship between principal control and agency slack: the higher the control over the agent, the less likely is the agent to slack. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by explicitly taking the varying nature of agents into account. While control may reduce the agent's room for maneuver, it does not explain the extent to which different agents are inclined to put efforts in circumventing these obstacles. Focusing on international organizations (IOs), we measure member states' as principals' control over IO administrations as their agents as well as the latter's intrinsic propensity to slack across eight major IOs. The analysis shows that low control by the principal is not necessarily associated with run‐away agents, whereas high control is not necessarily associated with servant‐like agents. The assumed control–slack relationship can thus be distorted and determining an ideal level of control is not possible without considering the agent's entrepreneurialism.