Persistence Against the Odds: How Entrepreneurial Agents Helped the UN Joint Inspection Unit to Prevail

Eugenia C. Heldt; Patrick A. Mello; Anna Novoselova; Omar Ramon Serrano Oswald

doi:10.1111/1758-5899.13048

Persistence Against the Odds: How Entrepreneurial Agents Helped the UN Joint Inspection Unit to Prevail

Eugenia C. Heldt, Patrick A. Mello, Anna Novoselova, Omar Ramon Serrano Oswald

Political Science and Public Administration

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Since its inception in 1966, the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) has prevailed in the face of significant existential challenges. Against this backdrop, we investigate how and why the JIU persisted over time. Combining delegation and historical institutionalist approaches, we posit that entrepreneurial agents and layering processes together help us better understand persistence of international organizations. Based on semi-structured interviews with UN staff and JIU inspectors, we examine three critical junctures in the history of the JIU. Our results show that entrepreneurial agents and stakeholders in the JIU managed to avoid the closure or demotion of the JIU by engaging in a strategy of institutional layering. Our analysis, however, also demonstrates that the JIU survived at the price of losing its privilege as the central UN oversight body. These findings have implications for the study of international organizations and for the reform of the UN system at large.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	235-246
Number of pages	12
Journal	Global Policy
Volume	13
Issue number	2
Early online date	17 Mar 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13048
Publication status	Published - May 2022

Funding

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the ECPR General Conference 2020, at the APSA Annual Meeting 2020, and at the ISA Annual Convention 2021. We would like to thank the following colleagues for helpful comments and feedback: Orfeo Fioretos, Stephanie Hofmann, Eva‐Maria Nag, Christian Kreuder‐Sonnen, Ronny Patz, Mark Pollack, Theresa Squatrito, Henning Schmidtke, Jonas Tallberg, Catherine Weaver, and two anonymous reviewers. We thank current and former inspectors and officials of the United Nations System who were exceedingly generous with their time and resources. This includes Inspectors of the Joint Inspection Unit of the United Nations System – Gopinathan Achamkulangare, Antonio Donini, Jorge Flores Callejas, Jesus Lara Alonso, Wolfgang Münch, Sukai Prom Jackson, and Goenke Roscher. It includes officials of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) of the United Nations Secretariat and the former head of OIOS Karl Theodor Paschke. This research was made possible by the generous support of the German Research Foundation under DFG project number 370183851 ‘International Bureaucracies as “Runaway Agents”? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack.’ All errors and fallacies remain our own. Open access funding enabled and organized by ProjektDEAL. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the ECPR General Conference 2020, at the APSA Annual Meeting 2020, and at the ISA Annual Convention 2021. We would like to thank the following colleagues for helpful comments and feedback: Orfeo Fioretos, Stephanie Hofmann, Eva-Maria Nag, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Ronny Patz, Mark Pollack, Theresa Squatrito, Henning Schmidtke, Jonas Tallberg, Catherine Weaver, and two anonymous reviewers. We thank current and former inspectors and officials of the United Nations System who were exceedingly generous with their time and resources. This includes Inspectors of the Joint Inspection Unit of the United Nations System – Gopinathan Achamkulangare, Antonio Donini, Jorge Flores Callejas, Jesus Lara Alonso, Wolfgang Münch, Sukai Prom Jackson, and Goenke Roscher. It includes officials of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) of the United Nations Secretariat and the former head of OIOS Karl Theodor Paschke. This research was made possible by the generous support of the German Research Foundation under DFG project number 370183851 ‘International Bureaucracies as “Runaway Agents”? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack.’ All errors and fallacies remain our own. Open access funding enabled and organized by ProjektDEAL.

Funders	Funder number
Joint Inspection Unit of the United Nations System
OIOS
Office of Internal Oversight Services
United Nations Secretariat
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft	370183851

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1111/1758-5899.13048Licence: CC BY

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International Bureaucracies as ‘Runaway Agents’? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack
C. Heldt, E. (Principal Investigator), Mello, P. A. (Principal Investigator), Serrano Oswald, O. R. (Project Researcher) & Novoselova, A. (PhD candidate)
1/10/17 → 31/08/22
Project: Research

Cite this

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abstract = "Since its inception in 1966, the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) has prevailed in the face of significant existential challenges. Against this backdrop, we investigate how and why the JIU persisted over time. Combining delegation and historical institutionalist approaches, we posit that entrepreneurial agents and layering processes together help us better understand persistence of international organizations. Based on semi-structured interviews with UN staff and JIU inspectors, we examine three critical junctures in the history of the JIU. Our results show that entrepreneurial agents and stakeholders in the JIU managed to avoid the closure or demotion of the JIU by engaging in a strategy of institutional layering. Our analysis, however, also demonstrates that the JIU survived at the price of losing its privilege as the central UN oversight body. These findings have implications for the study of international organizations and for the reform of the UN system at large.",

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Persistence Against the Odds: How Entrepreneurial Agents Helped the UN Joint Inspection Unit to Prevail

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UN SDGs

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International Bureaucracies as ‘Runaway Agents’? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack

Cite this