The politics of agenda setting at the global level: key informant interviews regarding the International Labour Organization Decent Work Agenda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Global labour markets continue to undergo significant transformations resulting from socio-political instability combined with rises in structural inequality, employment insecurity, and poor working conditions. Confronted by these challenges, global institutions are providing policy guidance to protect and promote the health and well-being of workers. This article provides an account of how the International Labour Organization's Decent Work Agenda contributes to the work policy agendas of the World Health Organization and the World Bank. METHODS: This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews with representatives from three global institutions--the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Of the 25 key informants invited to participate, 16 took part in the study. Analysis for key themes was followed by interpretation using selected agenda setting theories. RESULTS: Interviews indicated that through the Decent Work Agenda, the International Labour Organization is shaping the global policy narrative about work among UN agencies, and that the pursuit of decent work and the Agenda were perceived as important goals with the potential to promote just policies. The Agenda was closely linked to the World Health Organization's conception of health as a human right. However, decent work was consistently identified by World Bank informants as ILO terminology in contrast to terms such as job creation and job access. The limited evidence base and its conceptual nature were offered as partial explanations for why the Agenda has yet to fully influence other global institutions. Catalytic events such as the economic crisis were identified as creating the enabling conditions to influence global work policy agendas. CONCLUSIONS: Our evidence aids our understanding of how an issue like decent work enters and stays on the policy agendas of global institutions, using the Decent Work Agenda as an illustrative example. Catalytic events and policy precedents were found to contribute positively to agenda setting. Questions remain, however, across key informants about the robustness of the underlying evidence base for this Agenda and what meaningful impacts have been realized on the ground as a result.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".