Dr Kim Moloney1, Dr. Tamar Gutner
1Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
Biography:
Kim Moloney is an Associate Professor in the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Her book, Who Matters at the World Bank, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Her work focuses on the intersection of international organizations studies with the public administration discipline.
Abstract:
The study of the performance and behaviour of international organizations (IOs) has taken on greater urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions, polycrisis, criticism of individual IOs, and increasing postulation that the liberal international order is under severe strain. We argue that research on IO behaviour and performance can benefit from more attention to the development of middle-range theory that draws insights from other disciplines that study organizations and are not well understood by IO scholars. Such efforts open up the black box that is the IO and seek to better connect shareholder interests to internal processes, mechanisms, and incentives. While IO scholars do draw from other disciplines—mainly economics and sociology—the middle range theory gap in the study of IOs remains partially unfilled. We examine insights from other fields in two areas—organizational performance and organizational behaviour. The first area includes work on strategic management, corporate strategizing, performance management, and budgeting and financial management. The second area includes work on decision sciences and IOs, bureaucratic politics from public administration, and stakeholder theories of organizational studies. Each of our discussed approaches offers ways of closing international relations’ gap in middle range theory. We illustrate these approaches with examples from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and Asian Development Bank.