Legitimacy

This chapter examines the importance of legitimacy for international organizations, and their efforts to legitimate themselves vis-à-vis different audiences. Legitimacy, which for decades barely featured in the scholarly analysis of international organizations, has since the late 1990s been an increasingly important lens through which the processes, practices, and structures of international organizations have been examined. The chapter makes three main arguments. First, it argues that in most international organizations the most important actors engaging in legitimation efforts are not the supranational bureaucracies, but member states. This has important implications for our understanding of the purposes of seeking legitimacy, and for the possible practices. Second, legitimacy and legitimation serve a range of purposes for these states, beyond achieving greater compliance with their decisions, which has been one of the key functional logics highlighted for legitimacy in the literature. Instead, legitimacy is frequently sought to exclude outsiders from the functional or territorial domains affected by an international organization’s authority, or to maintain external material and political support for existing arrangements. Third, one of the most prominent legitimation efforts, institutional reforms, often prioritizes form over function, signalling to important and powerful audiences to encourage their continued material and political support. To advance these arguments, the chapter is divided into four sections. The first develops the concept of legitimacy and its application to international organizations, and then asks why their legitimacy has become such an important intellectual and political concern in recent years. The second part will look in more detail at the legitimation practices of international organizations, focusing on who engages in these practices, who the key audiences are, and how legitimation claims are advanced. The third section will look in more detail at one of the most common forms of legitimation – institutional reform – through the lens of two such reforms in international organizations: efforts towards greater interoperability in NATO, and the establishment of the African Peace and Security Architecture in the African Union (AU). The chapter will conclude with some reflections of the contribution that a legitimacy perspective has made to our understanding of the practices of international organizations

International transitional administrations and the politics of authority building

This article critically examines authority-building practices in the context of statebuilding through the lens of one particular form of external statebuilding interventions: international transitional administrations (ITAs), which are established by international organisations (mainly the UN) to exercise governmental functions over a territory, and in some cases to engage in the establishment or reform of political, administrative, and economic institutions. Drawing in particular on one ITA, the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), the article aims to critically evaluate authority building as a framework for understanding the practices of statebuilding operations, and to understand the complexities of political authority in statebuilding environments, and their implications for both the pursuit and the analysis of authority building. The discussion of authority building by ITAs will proceed in three steps. The first section briefly outlines the concept of political authority, in particular in the context of fragile and conflict-affected states and of international administrations, and discuss relevant methodological issues. Section two then examines three distinct aspects of authority building by ITAs: claiming and justifying their own authority; recognising and validating the authority claims of local actors and organisations; and strengthening the capacity of local actors to justify their authority claims. The final section concludes the paper with some reflections on political authority and authority building that arise from the discussion in the previous sections

La autoridad de las administraciones internacionales en la sociedad internacional

En este artículo se analiza cómo las administraciones internacionales que ejercen un poder gubernamental en territorios post conflicto justifican su autoridad política sin tener legitimidad democrática. En el artículo se estudia el establecimiento, los mandatos y las prácticas de gobierno de las administraciones de Bosnia, Kosovo y Timor Oriental y se identifican cinco fundamentos de la autoridad: el consentimiento, la delegación, el mantenimiento de la paz y la seguridad, el fomento de los derechos humanos y la democracia, y la disposición para gobernar. No obstante, todos estos aspectos son cuestionables. En concreto, la autoridad de las administraciones internacionales se debilita debido a sus prácticas, a que no existe la obligación rendir cuentas y a la efectividad limitada a la hora de disponer gobierno. Para concluir, en el artículo se destacan algunas posibles vías de refuerzo de la autoridad de las administraciones internacionales

Mapping evidence gaps in anti-corruption: assessing the state of the operationally relevant evidence on donors' actions and approaches to reducing corruption

This paper charts the current evidence on effectiveness of different anti-corruption reforms, and identifies significant evidence gaps. Despite a substantial amount of literature on corruption, this review found very few studies focusing on anti-corruption reforms, and even fewer that credibly assess issues of effectiveness and impact. The evidence was strong for only two types of interventions: public financial management (PFM) reforms and supreme audit institutions (SAIs). For PFM, the evidence in general showed positive results, whereas the effectiveness was mixed for SAIs. No strong evidence indicates that any of the interventions pursued have been ineffective, but there is fair evidence that anti-corruption authorities, civil service reforms and the use of corruption conditionality in aid allocation decisions in general have not been effective. The paper advocates more operationally-relevant research and rigorous evaluations to build up the missing evidence base, particularly in conflict-afflicted states, in regards to the private sector, and on the interactions and interdependencies between different anti-corruption interventions

From Elite Bargains to (More) Open and (More) Inclusive Politics

This paper examines the pathways from post-conflict elite bargains towards (more) open and (more) inclusive politics. It identifies cross-cutting issues and draws out the implications of the analysis for external actors seeking to support more inclusive politics

Overcoming undesirable resilience in the global food system

The current configuration of our global food system is undermining many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), leading to calls for major food system reform and transformation. Concurrently, other science-policy and business initiatives call for a food system more resilient to economic and environmental shocks, for example by improving the economic resilience of current supply chains. Prioritisation of short-term security to a subset of vested interests, however, can undermine the resilience of longer-term beneficial outcomes for society. Here we advocate a more inclusive and farsighted approach focussing on the resilience of positive outcomes for the whole of society, i.e., capturing the aim to promote resilient delivery of multiple UN SDGs. A significant challenge is to prioritise suites of interventions that can effectively transform the global food system to deliver these goals. Here, we use a transdisciplinary lens to identify ‘lock-in’ mechanisms that span four key areas— knowledge-based, economic/regulatory, sociocultural and biophysical constraints –which will help avoid ineffective siloed solutions to food system reform. Furthermore, we show how emergent system dynamics need to be considered using a more holistic approach. We highlight the importance of well-coordinated actions on multiple leverage points during windows of opportunity for food system transformation