Supranational authority : the role of the United Nations secretariat in the expansion of the departments of peacekeeping operations and political affairs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do member states generously finance some departments within an International Organisation, while others are starved for resources? Why do funding allocations shift over time? What role do bureaucrats themselves play in processes that influence this variation? For the most part, for example, the UN regular budget varies only slightly from one biennium to the next, but occasionally, there are sudden increases in the resources of a particular department. This project seeks to explain why. This thesis asserts that the UN Secretariat, and the Secretary-General in particular, can strategically utilise their expertise-based and principle-based authority in order to persuade member states to provide more resources to particular departments. I study the UN budget process to illustrate the avenues available for influence by the Secretary-General and other bureaucrats. I explore two in-depth case studies, drawing on extensive primary documents and sixteen expert interviews, to examine the actions of the Secretariat in the years leading up to the changes in both departments. These two moments of dramatic change were the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 2000/2001, and the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) from 2005 to 2008. In both, the Secretariat was able to leverage its informal authority to increase its resources, but only when the arguments they put forward accorded both with their type of authority, and with the values held by the audience; this persuasion was also only possible when member state blocs were not entrenched in opposition to each other on a related issue. The Secretariat used three strategies to achieve this: i) agenda setting, ii) initiating and expanding operations, and iii) multiplying authority by creating like-minded expert panels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".