Fall 2008 (22.3) Feature

Horizontal Accountability in Intergovernmental Organizations

Many intergovernmental organizations (IOs) have recently established offices of internal oversight. Yet scandals such as the one surrounding the Oil-for-Food Program in the United Nations have revealed serious flaws in the design of these institutions, especially their lack of independence from top administrators of the bureaucracies that they are supposed to oversee. This study argues that this is due, in great part, to the initial use of an imperfect domestic model. It shows that, in addition to using a flawed model as a starting point for negotiations, states and IO officials intentionally weakened oversight offices even more. The study argues that member-states need to quickly give such offices increased independence in order to make them more effective and to avoid the continued erosion of the legitimacy of IOs.

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More in this issue

Fall 2008 (22.3) Response

An Exchange: The Morality of Immigration [Full Text]

Writing in EIA 22, no. 1, Mathias Risse presented a novel way to think about the problem of immigration in the context of global justice, adopting the ...

Fall 2008 (22.3) Review

Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village by Daniel Deudney

An important insight, with consequences for foreign policy and the practice of world politics, is that in the "global village" changing technology invites and even ...

Fall 2008 (22.3) Review

Briefly Noted

This section contains a round-up of recent notable books in the field of international affairs.