Public Management in International Governmental Organizations

After defining International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) as membership organizations and presenting their classification, the chapter discusses the specific contextual factors they face. Those include ambiguities in the legal backdrop, limited administrative resources for regulatory execution and uncertain political contexts as well as the main trends of international governance that have interested IGOs, such as the shift from hard to soft law, the involvement in multi-stakeholder partnerships and the use of information and indicators to govern through evidence. The scholarly conception of IGOs as International Public Administrations (IPAs) has focused on the administrative apparatus of these bureaucracies and has advanced, among the others, our understanding of their governance arrangements and organizational structure. The final sections of the entry focuses on two pubic management challenges for IGOs. They offer an overview of the peculiarities of staffing and funding and discuss the critical consequences of blending multilateral considerations, such as geographic representation or resource politics, into managerial functions.