Bureaucratic autonomy of international organizations’ secretariats

Abstract

The contribution advances a theoretical conceptualization of the bureaucratic autonomy of international secretariats and suggests an empirical yardstick for its measurement. The proposed concept of bureaucratic autonomy focuses on administrative structures and provides an indicator-based approximation for the bureaucratic capacities of international organizations in order to systematically reveal variation in intra-organizational potential for autonomous bureaucratic behaviour. The usefulness and limitations of the concept are discussed in light of an empirical examination of 15 international secretariats.