Global governance insiders reveal how autonomous they really feel

International organizations have multiplied over the past decades, expanding their mandates and weaving themselves into dense, overlapping networks of institutions that now shape nearly every domain of world politics. Yet the people who actually run these organizations—the officials inside their secretariats—have rarely been asked, in a systematic and comparative way, how they experience this crowded institutional landscape. A new study published in Global Public Policy and Governance changes that. Drawing on an original survey of more than 1,000 international organization staff, researchers Adam Holesch, Jacint Jordana, Axel Marx and Lewin Schmitt offer an unprecedented inside view of two fundamental questions: how autonomous do international bureaucrats feel from their member states, and how problematic do they find their interactions with other international organizations?

The study draws on the GLOBE survey, an online questionnaire titled “International Organizations and the Future of Global Governance” administered between May and November 2021. The survey reached 1,004 staff members across 30 international organizations, with an 8.4 percent response rate that matches comparable elite surveys in the field. For this analysis, the authors narrowed the sample to 451 responses from four critical global governance sectors: trade, finance, security and climate change. Respondents were carefully selected—only secretariat members with policy-related roles were included, excluding purely administrative personnel, consultants and locally hired staff. To validate the sample, the researchers compared its demographic composition against official UN staff statistics covering 116,388 employees from 38 organizations, finding a reasonable approximation of the broader international civil service.

The survey’s first major contribution is a new empirical variable: perceived autonomy. Respondents rated, on a five-point scale, how autonomous their organization is from the influence of individual member states across five policy functions—settling disputes between member states, setting policies and strategies, reviewing internal operations, establishing organizational norms, and ensuring compliance. The results reveal moderate autonomy overall, with a weighted mean of 2.92, just below the midpoint of the scale. Scores across the 18 organizations analyzed ranged from 2.2 to 3.5, indicating meaningful variation but no dramatic outliers. Notably, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade scored highest at 3.5, followed closely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group at 3.49, the International Organization of Securities Commissions at 3.4, and DG CLIMA at 3.32. At the bottom of the ranking sat the Financial Stability Board at 2.2, NATO at 2.3, and the OSCE and Mercosur, both at 2.6.

Perhaps the most technically interesting finding concerns where autonomy is strongest and weakest within organizations. Staff perceive their institutions as most autonomous in reviewing internal operations, with a mean of 3.27, and in norm-setting, at 3.26. This suggests that international bureaucracies enjoy considerable discretion over their own administrative machinery, largely insulated from direct state interference. Autonomy drops sharply, however, in functions that expose organizations to external political pressure. Policy-setting scores a mean of just 2.62, and dispute resolution between member states falls to the lowest level at 2.57. In other words, the closer an organization’s activity moves to the contested politics of its member states, the less independent its staff feel—a pattern consistent with principal-agent theory, which holds that states retain their tightest control over the most consequential delegations of authority.

The researchers benchmarked these perceptions against two established quantitative datasets: the International Authority Database, which measures de jure authority across seven policy functions, and the Measure of International Authority dataset, which tracks delegation and pooling of legal authority. The comparison produced instructive convergences and divergences. The security sector scored lowest in both datasets—0.25 in the IAD and 0.27 in MIA delegation—and staff perceptions confirmed this, with a sector mean of 2.68, the lowest of the four. Trade, which ranks highest in MIA delegation at 0.44, delivered a correspondingly high perceived autonomy of 3.17. But the within-sector variation proved more striking than the between-sector differences. The finance sector contains both one of the most autonomous organizations in the sample, IOSCO at 3.4, and one of the least, the Financial Stability Board at 2.2. Similarly, trade spans the entire spectrum, from DG TRADE at the top to Mercosur near the bottom.

The study’s second axis examined horizontal interactions—how staff perceive their dealings with other international organizations. Here the findings challenge a core assumption of the regime complexity literature. Scholars have long warned that dense, overlapping governance architectures produce “governance congestion”: conflicting mandates, coordination failures and institutional rivalry that degrade policy outcomes. Yet when asked to rate challenges such as overlapping responsibilities, implementation of field actions, hierarchical relations, competition and the involvement of too many actors, staff reported relatively few problems. The weighted overall score was 3.72 on a five-point scale where higher values indicate fewer difficulties—clearly above the midpoint and closer to “somewhat problematic” than to genuinely problematic. Mercosur, the WTO and IOSCO reported the smoothest inter-organizational relations, while the African Union at 2.99 and UNEP at 3.18 reported the most friction.

Sectoral patterns in these interactions are statistically robust. Trade organizations reported the fewest challenges, with a sector mean of 3.97, followed by finance at 3.81, security at 3.71 and climate change at 3.46. Pairwise t-tests confirmed that most of these differences are significant, with the largest gap between trade and climate change, where the t-statistic reached approximately 12.19. Within the issue-level breakdown, the implementation of field actions was the least problematic challenge overall, with a weighted mean of 3.92, while the involvement of too many actors was the most troublesome at 3.39. This last finding is telling: it suggests that the primary friction in global governance is not rivalry between organizations but sheer institutional crowding—too many players at the table, particularly in the fragmented climate regime, where UNFCCC and UNEP staff both flagged actor proliferation as a leading concern.

The sector-specific results map closely onto what institutional theory would predict, with some surprises. In finance, the pillar-like structure of the sector—where IOSCO monopolizes securities regulation and the Bank for International Settlements occupies a unique niche with no direct competitors—translated into minimal reported inter-organizational conflict. The IMF scored 3.01 on perceived autonomy versus the BIS at 2.73, confirming that the Fund enjoys greater internal discretion, especially over reviewing its own operations, but remains constrained in dispute resolution and policy-setting, echoing scholarship that portrays the IMF as a negotiation arena shaped by powerful members. In security, the dominance of member states and the veto politics of the UN Security Council produced the lowest autonomy perceptions, with NATO and the OSCE particularly exposed—though the IAEA, acting as a coordinating body, bucked the trend. The African Union emerged as the sample’s clearest case of governance congestion, reporting the highest difficulties across overlapping mandates, competition and crowded coordination spaces.

The climate change sector delivered the study’s most sobering portrait. Consistent with the fragmentation literature pioneered by scholars like Keohane and Victor, climate staff reported the most problematic interactions of any sector, driven by hierarchical tensions, competition and the proliferation of actors ranging from UN bodies to city networks like C40. Yet the sector also displayed a sharp internal divide: DG CLIMA and C40 staff perceived high autonomy, while UN institutions recorded significantly lower scores. Taken together, the findings suggest that fears of systemic governance congestion may be overstated for well-structured, functionally specialized regimes like trade and finance, but remain valid for fragmented domains like climate and security. The authors frame their study as an exploratory first step, calling for longitudinal research on how budget changes, external political shocks and shifting ideologies in key member states translate into the internal behavior of international bureaucracies—and ultimately into the policy outcomes that affect us all.

Subject of Research: Perceived autonomy and inter-organizational interactions among international organization staff across global governance sectors

Article Title: Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions

Article References: Holesch, A., Jordana, J., Marx, A., & Schmitt, L. (2025). Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 205-228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Keywords: international organizations, global governance, bureaucratic autonomy, regime complexity, GLOBE survey, WTO, IMF, climate governance, security governance, trade governance, international bureaucracies, member states