Chapter 2 offers a novel conceptualization of administrative styles. Depending on dominant strategic orientations shaping administrative routines, we identify four ideal types to systematically assess IPAs’ policy influence: a servant style, an advocacy style, a consolidator style, and an entrepreneurial style. In addition to this conceptual innovation, we offer a theoretical framework accounting for the variation in administrative styles across different international bureaucracies. We argue that the variation in administrative styles across different organizations can be explained by two factors, namely the perceptions of internal and external challenges.

This chapter presents the main aims, research questions and key contributions. While a consensus seems to be emerging that bureaucracies of international organizations are of growing relevance for policy making beyond the nation-state, we still do not systematically understand if and how exactly international bureaucracies seek to influence policies. We show that, most importantly, there is a lack of concepts for a comparative assessment of bureaucratic influence across different international organizations.

The concluding chapter gives an overview of our key results and critically reassess our conceptual and theoretical approach in light of our empirical findings. We discuss theoretical implications and some limitations to our study and conclude by pointing out future avenues for research, including the need to investigate the link between administrative styles and policy outputs, the interaction of formal autonomy and administrative styles, as well as issues of stability and change of administrative styles.

This chapter focuses s on the IMF and the UNHCR as two IPAs that display a highly entrepreneurial administrative style. These IPAs share routines that combine strong policy advocacy with institutional consolidation. Taking account of the high differences in formal autonomy between the two IPAs, these similarities in administrative styles are striking. In particular, one might intuitively expect that in view of its limited autonomy the UNHCR should display a servant style. Yet, what these IPAs have in common is the perception of similarly low internal and high external constraints that facilities the emergence of entrepreneurial routines in both.

In this chapter, the comparison of the NATO and the ILO reveals similar administrative styles despite them having almost nothing in common in structural terms. While NATO’s servant style is not particularly astounding, given its policy area, mandate, and functional design, the ILO’s case is puzzling. Despite it being an organization with rather broad autonomy, (normative) authority, and high legitimacy, the ILO’s IPA regularly behaves very passively when it comes to putting its own stance on the IO’s outputs. We show that their similar servant styles can traced back high internal challenges and to the perception of not particularly pronounced external pressures. In conjunction, the constraints arising from the former and the sense of security stemming from the latter render more entrepreneurial behaviour neither possible nor necessary.

Chapter 5 compares the IOM and FAO. It highlights how internal challenges in the absence of serious external threats favour a similar consolidator style in the two IPAs. Both IPAs combine pronounced routines directed towards institutional consolidation with only weak policy advocacy. We show that neither size, budgets, mandate, nor organizational structure can convincingly account both for the IPAs’ pronounced positional orientation and their lack of functional orientation geared towards advocacy. Moreover, the chapter draws attention to the stickiness of administrative styles in showing that such deeply and institutionalized organizational routines tend to display high stability towards endogenous and exogenous change.

This chapter outlines how these conceptual and theoretical considerations can be studied empirically and offers a detailed overview of the operationalization of IPAs’ administrative styles. We suggest an operationalization of administrative styles that relies on nine indicators loosely corresponding to a shortened policy cycle model. Moreover, we present our empirical understanding of the key explanatory factors that can account for the variation in administrative styles across different organizations and reflect upon our interview–based methodological approach. By using a two–step case selection strategy, we are able to demonstrate that IPAs do indeed develop very different administrative styles, which formal and structural organizational features alone cannot account for. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on the rationale for case selection and by presenting a brief overview of the IPAs under study.

This chapter is concerned with the WHO and UNEP as examples of advocate–style IPAs. These IPAs share behavioural patterns that have allowed them to establish themselves as ‘advocates’ in the area of environmental and global health matters. Despite their apparent common capability of solving problems of global scale, the two IPAs could hardly be more different when considering only their structural features. We show that this commonality in styles, despite structural dissimilarities, is due to the similarly strong perception of external threats and the comparatively low level of internal challenges. Strong expertise and a common belief system contribute to the formation of an advocacy–orientated administrative style while at the same time, a medium level of perceived external challenges prompts both IPAs to also feature at least some characteristics of a consolidator.

As we have seen in Part I, innovation is often lauded as the saviour we desperately need, as if it is some kind of knight in shining armour astride his noble steed, Market Economy, capable of redressing all the injustices of world. Sometimes, it is acknowledged, the knight doesn't deliver quite as we hoped and some readjustments are needed – enter the faithful squire, Responsibility. But when the knight is more like Don Quixote, tilting at non-existent giants, and the market is more akin to his horse Rocinante (who was too far past its use-by date to fulfil its tasks), to keep replacing the fallen hero in his saddle isn't enough.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, the market economy is, in fact, not shaped to deliver what we expect from a supposedly prosperous society (namely real social progress and benefits, such as genuine wage growth, better environmental outcomes and so on). So what happens if we rid our hero of the steed and we meet our knight on foot, with no expectation of any specific outcome for Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Taking this agnosticism to GDP as our starting point – what van den Bergh (2011) calls the ‘a-growth’ paradigm – we ask what happens now when our knight Innovation meets his squire Responsibility? What becomes possible once we stop trying to ride the market and instead innovate independent of market-directed aspirations?

In Chapter 2, we saw how Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) emerged from responses to the inadequacy of modern structures to deal responsibly with science and technology (S&T)-induced risks and uncertainties, situations often characterized by disputed underlying values, social and/or epistemic resistance and conflicts, and urgent political decisions. Although RRI/RI opens science, technology and innovation (STI) to broader public debate and seeks to integrate various kinds of expertise (technical, sociological, lay) into decisionmaking about specific technologies, RI alone cannot sufficiently address societal, ethical and ecological concerns about broader STI processes, nor how these are shaped by, and respond to, externalities in the global political economy. So long as RI is embedded in the GDP growth paradigm, it risks only ever rearranging Don Quixote in his saddle rather than calling forth a better knight (whatever that might be).