International organizations (IOs) with permanent bureaucracies depend on funding and staff. But what do IO bureaucracies do when governments repeatedly fail to adopt a budget? Building on recent debates on IO resourcing and the role of IO bureaucracies in global policymaking, this article argues that international bureaucracies act entrepreneurially during budget crises but that conflict among states places constraints on entrepreneurialism. We explore constrained entrepreneurialism by studying the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), focusing on the period after 2022, when the organization was operating without a regular budget due to the fallout from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on 80 interviews with OSCE officials and national diplomats, our findings show that while the OSCE bureaucracy engaged in entrepreneurial practices to sustain core operations and mobilize resources, deadlock between Russia and Ukraine's supporters, coupled with the OSCE's strict consensus rule, placed severe constraints on these efforts.
Policy implications
- States, as principals of international public administrations (IPAs), should provide reliable and sufficient funding and also in-kind contributions such as high-quality secondments, so that IPAs can implement their mandates.
- In consensus-based IOs such as OSCE where decisions on some matters are blocked, IPAs should, together with supportive states, identify areas where consensus is possible (as was the case with the OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine) or where veto players tacitly accept entrepreneurial workarounds (as in the case of the Support Progamme Ukraine).
- States that want to maintain the vitality of IOs experiencing budgetary crises should support entrepreneurial core funding initiatives, such as the OSCE's Core Support Mechanism, to allow IOs to cope with decision-making blockades.
- States and IPA leaders need to jointly coordinate entrepreneurial resource mobilization throughout the IO to prevent unhealthy internal competition for scarce resources and to maintain credibility towards donors. For the OSCE this means institutionalizing a centralized resource mobilization unit.
Photo by Pixabay