Treating Global Governance Seriously

Soonhee Kim, Shena Ashley, and W. Henry Lambright, eds., Public Administration in the Context of Global Governance (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014). 256 pp. $117.03/£75.00 (paper), ISBN: 9781783477791; $105.33/£67.50 (eBook), eISBN: 9781783477807. According to the University of Michigan's “Correlates of War” database (www. correlatesofwar.org), there are 332 international intergovernmental organizations (IOs)—i.e., formal organizations set up by more than two governments—out of which 69 are global in that they have at least one member state from each of the five continents. The overwhelming research on these institutions has come from international relations (IR) scholars, who have generally seen these organizations as arenas where international politics occur (Hurd 2013). That IR scholars may be interested in these organizations is reasonable. What is astonishing is the little attention they have attracted from administrative and organizational scholars. In fact, perhaps one of the first administrative takes on these institutions came from IR scholars adopting an administrative lens (Barnett and Finnemore 2003). As of late, however, this has been changing. Political scientists have started to explore decision-making in IOs (Colomer 2014). Institutional theorists have looked at global governance to understand rule-making and rule-taking (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006), and economic approaches—such as incentives analysis and game theory—have been used to understand international institutional design (Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal 2001). Business schools have also started to look into these international administrative phenomena (see the annual research workshop, the “Barcelona Workshop on Global Governance” organized by a business school [to which we belong] and an international studies school, now in its 4th edition [www.bcnwgg.net]). The public administration (PA) literature had so far ignored the international institutional setting (an exception comes from one of the contributing authors of this edited book [Koppell 2007]). Thankfully, this does not seem the case anymore. And Public Administration in the Context of Global Governance is another step in the right direction. This is so because PA has a lot to offer. IOs resemble in many cases public agencies, with certain rigidities and bureaucratic traits well known by PA scholars. Also, based on anecdotal evidence, they have been incorporating many management practices—in particular, strategic and performance management related—with which national public agencies have been struggling for at least four decades now (Bryson and Roering 1987). As the editors of this volume state: “there is leadership and management of public-serving organizations and implementation of public-policy” in IOs (xiii). The first author of this review, with 14 years of experience as secretary general in two international organizations, strongly agrees with this statement. The editors correctly underscore that these organizations face issues of public purpose, values, legitimacy, authority, and accountability in a similar way to a (sub)national governmental administration. To their credit, they also realistically warn of the specificities of these organizations, perhaps the most important being the lack of a clear anchoring in sovereignty. Stimulatingly, in the introduction to the volume, the editors draw a parallel between the current administrative interest in IOs to that experienced by the PA field itself back in the 1930s. Indeed, network management theory from PA has been successfully applied recently to international organizations (Saz-Carranza ; Saz-Carranza et al. 2014). And the Blavatnik School of Government (Oxford University) recently produced for the World Economic Forum a report exploring leadership in global governance (Woods et al. 2015). This volume contributes directly to this growing effort. In its first chapter following the introduction, PA scholar O'Toole proposes several theoretical avenues future research should follow when studying IOs, while in another chapter in Part 1 of the book, O'Leary proposes, in line with her collaborative public management background, an open systems approach for studying global public administration. Koppell and Lambright use empirical cases to provide insights on decision making in IOs and for managing international collaboration among national agencies from different countries, respectively. Bauer and Ege, bridging political science and PA, look at determinants of IO autonomy (with respect to their principals, i.e., member states). Kim, for his part, looks at global governance institutions in Asia, while Kay and Carroll compare two IOs: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Busch's review of the IO literature from an administrative perspective is particularly useful as a steppingstone for future research. And Malone, Shawar, and Shiffman carry out the intellectual effort to translate broad PA findings to the IO context. Moving in the other direction, PA has a lot to gain too. As the world turns into a global multigovernance system, piling levels from the local to the global through the subnational regional, national, and supranational regional echelons, traditional PA research must acknowledge this new context. Political economists have documented very well the new environment where IOs impose limitations and requirements on national and subnational administrations (Rodrik 2011). Yet its administrative consequences on national government systems have been almost completely ignored. Here, O'Toole's chapter also provides future paths for researching PA in an international multilevel context. And Hirsch looks at the sovereignty versus international commitment dilemma as it occurs in the climate change field. While of interest, other chapters seem a little further away from the book's initial aims. Lodge and Jreisat separately cover the need and development of international dialogue among scholars on (national) regulation and PA, respectively. Perry and Yu-Hung Lai separately refer to more traditional (yet still underdeveloped) comparative PA. Perry calls for rigorous and updated research strategies while Yu-Hung Lai compares two distinct government public health regimes. Austvik's chapter focuses on the optimum levels of international economic integration, which is clearly closer to trade economics than to PA. Perhaps a minor weakness of the book is to try to cover too much ground at once—the editors do recognize this in the conclusion. Under the same container, we find both an interest in applying PA to global governance but also the more traditional comparative PA sort of literature. The latter, while being of extreme interest and having yet to advance much more, is of lesser novelty and its fit with the conversation on global governance is less obvious. The structuring of the book is also somewhat confusing. The first two parts—“What Does the Global Governance Context Mean for Public Administration? Theory, Practice and Research” and “Administrative Dimensions in Global Governance: Autonomy, Legitimacy and Influence”—lack internal coherence and clearly overlap, while the third part coheres around the healthcare sector (“Global Health: Examining the Public Administration and International Relations Nexus”). Lastly, the book could have drawn from research on arguably the most advanced supranational institutions, namely the EU system (Boin, Busuioc, and Groenleer 2014; Trondal 2007). The editors’ conclusion identifies key themes that seem relevant to global governance and international institutions. These are networks, conflict management, accountability, implementation, and leadership. The authors then justify these themes by conceptually applying them to three real cases: climate change, global poverty, and exploring Mars. Overall, those of us researching supranational administrations, bureaucracies, and collaboration should greet this book with joy. The book is in itself a very welcome effort and will become hopefully the definitive starting shot for the PA scholarship field to firmly include international governmental organizations and collaboration in its constellation of research subjects. Javier Solana is president of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, Spain, and distinguished fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Institution. He is also senior fellow at Hertie School of Governance (Berlin), the London School of Economics, and the Institute of Modern International Relations of Tsinghua University. He is a board member of Aspen Institute, the International Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Human Rights Watch. He has been Secretary General of the Council of the European Union (EU), High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the EU, Secretary General of NATO, and National Minister in the Spanish government.E-mail: [email protected] Angel Saz-Carranza is director of the ESADEgeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and lecturer of the Department of Strategy of ESADE Business School, Spain. He earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Imperial College (University of London) and a PhD in public management from ESADE. He spent 3 years as a visiting scholar at Wagner School of Public Service (New York University) and is a beneficiary of La Caixa and Fulbright scholarships. His research focuses on goal-directed networks and international organizations.E-mail: [email protected]

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