GPPi sets out research agenda on international bureaucracies

In December 2009, GPPi researchers Thorsten Benner, Stephan Mergenthaler and Philipp Rotmann published an article on an agenda for furthering research on international bureaucracies, a topic neglected by international relations researchers over the past decades. The piece, titled Internationale Bürokratien und Organisationslernen, Konturen einer Forschungsagenda, appears in the ​“Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen,” Germany’s leading peer-reviewed academic journal on international relations.

The article identifies eleven topics for further research: internal governance, leadership, interaction with principals, inter-organizational relations, roles in new forms of public-private governance, authority/​influence, accountability/​legitimacy, impact evaluation, institutional design, change/​reform and learning. It uses the topic of organizational learning as an illustration for the research agenda and presents a framework for analyzing learning in international bureaucracies. It also discusses challenges for better embedding research on international bureaucracies into the discipline of international relations. 

The article was written as part of the Learning to Build Peace? project supported by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung.