Guest lecture by Prof. Yves Schémeil of Global and Comparative Politics at the University of Grenoble

Reform to perform? The efficiency and survival of International Organizations

International Organizations are not world bureaucracies: as any organization, they must solve well-known management and strategic problems. Internally, they adopt new tools, state new norms, and set new goals. Externally, they coalesce to control undesired overlap, prevent dangerous encroachment, and import best practices. To simultaneously fulfil their initial mandate and enlarge it in an increasingly competitive context they must address coordination issues. This requires slack resources that are themselves conducive to innovation.  Instead of shutting down once the conditions that led to their creation disappear, or being merged with peer organizations when economies of scale are the promises of success, they survive as individual organizations. Explaining the contradiction between their vulnerability and their efficiency stems from an adequate understanding of their mixed nature. To negotiate the trade-off between short-term performance and long-term resilience most of them are hybrid (a mix of public, private and third sector organizations), dualistic (with a duplicate technical and political decision-making system), and ambidextrous (pursuing exploitation and exploration).

Yves Schemeil is professor of political science at the University of Grenoble; Global and Comparative Politics Professor, Institut Universitaire de France; head, research group on International Organizations (PACTE laboratory, CNRS Grenoble). He teaches in several master programs in France, Switzerland, Japan, and Lebanon. His current work addresses some issues that are neglected by the scholarly literature, like the management of IOs and world reordering. To assess the causes of the former he focuses on the drivers of adaptive behavior. To identify the explanatory variables that are shaping the world, he compares the various organizational and constitutional designs that may be more or less conducive to a more institutionalized planet in the long run.

Recent publications by Yves Schemei can be downloaded here: