NO STRINGS ATTACHED?
A Study of Donor Influence on Organisational
Change in the United Nations System
By
Lika Everstova
June 2018
Dr. David Laws,
Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Anne Loeber,
Second Reader
A Thesis
Presented to the
Graduate School of Social Sciences,
University of Amsterdam
In Partial Fulfilment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Science
in
Conflict Resolution and Governance
Abstract
Since the turn of this century, non-core funding has become the largest source of income for United Nations organisations. In most cases, non-core contributions are earmarked, which means that the funding agreement is contingent on the fulfilment of certain requirements of either administrative (e.g. reporting style) or strategic nature (e.g. funds are exclusively reserved for a specific purpose) In this research, I explore how donors influence organisational change in the United Nations system through earmarking. This thesis adopts the idea of continuous change and uses the concept of sensemaking to investigate the extent of donor influence. In arguing that donors cannot dictate organisations their preferences, I build on the case study of Rome-based agencies to show that the outcomes of sensemaking processes are unpredictable. An important theme that emerges from this research is the role that individual organisational members play in in sensemaking. Understanding how sensemaking processes in the United Nations system play out can lead to discussions about what United Nations employees can do to make them more effective. Key terms: sensemaking, bureaucracies, intergovernmental organisations, organisational change
Acknowledgements
The idea to conduct research about donor influence on United Nations organisations came to me a year ago during my internship at the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU). That's where I began to explore the United Nations system and I would like to thank all the JIU staff and especially Inspector Tarasov, Inspector Gopinathan, Stefan, and Vicki for inspiration and for the wonderful time I had in Geneva.
I would also like to thank all the staff and students of the Conflict Resolution and Governance programme for their feedback and help. In particular, Dr. Martijn Dekker for helping me during the early research stages and Dr. Anna Loeber for agreeing to be the second reader for this thesis. Most importantly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. David Laws. Not only David possesses an incredible amount of knowledge and expertise, he also has this great talent to see straight to the core of any idea however awkwardly expressed.
I would quite literally not been able to complete this thesis without all the wonderful people who helped me in Rome. A big thank you to my second family for letting me stay with them and to Veronica for being an amazing friend. I also really appreciate the help I got from everyone who responded to my messages and especially those who agreed to participate in this research. I hope you find it interesting! And last but not least, a huge thank you to my family for their endless support. Special thanks to my grandmother, my mum and my brother for giving me the opportunities to learn and to grow. And big thanks to Joey for designing this amazing cover, proofreading, and also for feeding me and looking after me for the last couple of months. It would have been much more stressful without you!
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Pressures for Change in the United Nations System... 1 1.1 Surprising Findings... 1 1.2 The Original Story ... 3 1.3 The Study ... 6 2. Making Sense of Organisational Change ... 7 2.1 Episodic and Process Theories of Organisational Change ... 8 2.2 Individuals and Organisational Change: Introducing Sensemaking ... 12 2.3 From Sensemaking to Organising ... 14 2.4 Conceptual Tools: Organisational Plans, Artefacts and Practices ... 17 2.5 Relevance and Limitations of the Thesis ... 20 2.6 Revisiting the Research Question ... 22 2.7 Chapter Summary... 24 3. Research Design ... 25 3.1 Case Study Strategy: Why the Rome-Based Agencies? ... 26 3.2 Research Methods ... 28 3.3 Ethical Statement ... 33 3.4 Limitations ... 34 4. Research Findings ... 36 4.1 The Cultural Realm of the United Nations ... 37 4.2 The Role of Organisational Structure in Sensemaking ... 41 4.3 Social Construction of Meanings and Donor Influence on Sensemaking ... 48 4.4 The Role of Individual Sensemaking ... 56 4.5 Bringing Pieces Together ... 60 4.6 Chapter Summary... 63 5. Conclusion ... 65 5.1 Discussion ... 66 5.2 Theoretical Implications ... 70 5.3 Practical Implications ... 71 5.4 Further Research ... 72 References... 74 Appendices... 801. Introduction: Pressures for Change
in the United Nations System
1.1 Surprising Findings
I embarked on this research journey with the goal of exploring the causal relationship between the preferences of the big donors and the changes in policies and internal structures of development agencies. Rich countries can directly influence the change in priorities of United Nations organisations—with that view in mind I landed in Rome Fiumicino airport in April 2018. The preliminary research of United Nations official documents and oversight reports had shown that donors could influence not only what projects the money was spent on, but also how agencies operated on the day-to-day basis, for example donors could change how organisations evaluated and reported on their activities (UN JIU, 2017). After my first interview, I had acquired even more evidence to support my view: “Usually when a donor asks something, people start running,” said Michael1 in response to my question about the extent of donor influence. “It would be easier to get contact with high management as an intern at the Permanent Representation of some rich country than it is for me and most of my colleagues” (Interview with Michael, April 2018). According to Michael, learning about donor importance has been one of the biggest discoveries since he joined the Food and Agriculture Organisation five years ago. He illustrated his point with a helpful sketch, in which FAO was represented as a beggar, while donors were portrayed as two suited gentlemen giving the beggar some change. The overall balance of power in the picture was very clear: donors were “the bosses” and could dictate their rules (Interview with Michael, April 2018).
Figure 1—Sketch of FAO relationship with donors (Source: Interview with Michael, April, 2018)
The next day after my interview with Michael, I had a meeting with William, who worked for one of the donor agencies. I thought he would probably try to downplay the influence of donors on the internal affairs of the agencies, but he could not possibly deny the ability of rich countries to sponsor the programmes they found more important at the expense of other projects. In my head, the story about the role of money and power in international development was beginning to take shape. To my surprise however, William did not seem to be the grey cardinal of agriculture that I had imagined. Although he was happy with some of the recent policy developments and project choices in Rome-based agencies, he would really like to challenge some of the others (Interview with William, April 2018). In general, William seemed to find it frustrating how difficult it was to get his voice heard even though his country provided resources to all three of the Rome-based agencies and was one of the bigger donors. “But what about the money?” I insisted. “Does your agency use earmarked resources that have strict requirements attached?” William shrugged his shoulders. Some bilateral projects indeed had conditions attached, but they were “kind of isolated”, he said. (Interview with William, April, 2018). William argued that the money doesn’t “seem to add up” in the sense that donors did not have the ability to influence the general direction of change. According to him, donors can exert some influence, but they cannot influence how organisations develop and change. In William’s view, organisations change because they have to adapt to globalisation and donors had a small role to play in it.
Figure 2—Sketch of organisational change and the role of big donors (Source: Interview with William, April, 2018)
The two pictures of donor influence on United Nations organisations could not be more different. In Michael’s view, rich countries have the power to dictate agencies their preferences and to demand the implementation of certain policies and projects. Organisations are “beggars” dependent on donors’ money. According to William, big donors have a very limited ability to influence organisational practices despite providing the majority of the resources. This is because donors cannot influence how organisations change: they adapt to globalisation, while donors and organisational management play secondary roles. During the course of my fieldwork, I encountered a variety of opinions that would fit somewhere on the spectrum between these two extremes. But after the first two interviews with Michael and William, I already started to wonder whether big donors really had the power to influence how intergovernmental organisations changed. 1.2 The Original Story The United Nations organisations have formal mechanisms in place that give the executive board the power to institute changes, but they are also facing many external pressures. Some of them are the same factors that affect many public sector, private sector and third sector organisations across the globe. Technological breakthroughs, environmental challenges, and new political developments: these are the circumstances that form the setting for all
organisational activity. But there is one particular issue—funding—that, as I thought, had a disproportionally large influence on United Nations organisations.
Despite widespread donor commitment to “country ownership” that was institutionalised in the Paris Declaration (2005), the majority of development assistance continues to be supply driven (Booth, 2011). Funding agencies impose policy and political conditionality not just on recipient governments, but also on development and humanitarian agencies (Ibid.). United Nations organisations are funded predominantly by their member states through core and non-core contributions (UN DESA, 2018).2 Core contributions, also referred to as assessed contributions or the regular budget, are meant to cover the main costs arising from the work of the UN organisations.3 Organisations may decide for which
purpose to use this funding and are not restricted in their decision. Consequently, core contributions’ allocation and use are directly linked to multilateral mandates and strategic plan priorities of organisations. By contrast, non-core contributions, also referred to as voluntary or extra-budgetary, are usually restricted with regard to their application. In most cases, non-core contributions are earmarked, which means that the funding agreement is contingent on the fulfilment of certain requirements of either administrative (e.g. reporting style) or strategic nature (e.g. funds are exclusively reserved for a specific purpose) (UN JIU, 2017). For this reason, the allocation and use of non-core contributions are directly linked to donor priorities. While both types of funding serve their specific purposes, the balance between the two has become skewed in favour of non-core contributions. Since the turn of this century, non-core funding has become the largest source of income for United Nations organisations (UN JIU, 2014; UN DESA, 2015; UN JIU, 2017). My original expectation was that due to the need to comply with donor requirements outlined in non-core funding agreements, organisations would need to adapt to donors’ demands by implementing certain policies and practices. For example, the World Food Programme (WFP) is entirely voluntary funded (See Figure 3). 2 Private sector partnerships, inter-organisational funding and other funding mechanisms exist but represent a small share of overall contributions.
Figure 3—The balance between core and non-core resources (Source: UN DESA, document A/73/63, January 2018) A question arises of whether this funding is earmarked and if it can have an influence on operational and normative changes in WFP polices. Why does it matter? Donor influence can certainly be a force for good: in particular, demanding paperwork standards could foster innovation and increase efficiency of administrative practices in United Nations organisations. On the other hand, earmarking may introduce a secondary system of prioritisation that is not internal to organisation’s decision-making process. For an organisation with a dual mandate, such as WFP, external influences present a risk of shifting the intricate balance between humanitarian aid and development. Other organisations may find themselves implementing projects beyond their areas of expertise. Unless organisations rely primarily on their knowledge management systems and years of experience in the development sector, the whole multilateral framework of development assistance could be weakened. If earmarking had a greater influence than formal decision-making mechanisms when it came to implementing new programmes and policies, United Nations bodies could lose their legitimacy. This is why I found it so important to investigate the extent of donor influence on United Nations organisations. In this thesis I seek to address the issue of dependency of organisations on earmarked funding and the consequences it may have for the ways in which organisations develop and change.
1.3 The Study
This study is divided into multiple sections. The following chapter develops the theoretical framework that frames the research, combining continuous view of organisational change with the theory of sensemaking in order to provide conceptual tools for addressing the research question: How do donors influence organisational change in the United Nations system? The central research question is addressed through a more specific set of sub-questions that inform the research design of this thesis. Chapter Three elaborates on the methodology used and introduce the case study of Rome-based agencies. Chapter Four presents research findings and is divided into five sections: section 4.1 discusses how cultural setting may influence organisational change in Rome-based agencies. Section 4.2 examines how structural elements shape the activities and cognitive processes of organisational members. This allows me to address the main topic of this research in section 4.3 and explore how donors can influence organisational practices when organisational structures are weakened. Section 4.4 takes a step further to discuss the role of individual United Nations employees and how they contribute to or resist external and internal pressures. The final section brings different pieces of the research puzzle together and provides answers to research sub-questions. The concluding chapter of the thesis discusses the findings and elaborates on theoretical and practical implications of this research. Appendices include extracts from interview transcripts that supplement the analysis.
2. Making Sense of Organisational Change
What is change? We can all visualise change: one might think of the change of seasons, the cycle of life, the changing views as a train travels through the countryside. The concept of change, however, is more elusive and it has occupied philosophers since the Ancient time. A Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously stated, "upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow" How can the river change and yet remain constant? This paradox of change is vividly illustrated by the Ship of Theseus, an Ancient Greek puzzle recounted by Plutarch in his Life of Theseus (Plutarch, 1914, p.49). It can be summarized asfollows: imagine that the ship of Theseus arrives in Athens’ harbour with the young people of Athens who escaped the labyrinth of Crete. In order to commemorate Theseus and to honour the Gods who helped him, the Athenians decide to preserve the ship. But as the years go by, the original planks decay and have to be replaced by new timber. As less and less of the original wood remains, a logical question arises: is this "the same" ship or not? In other words, if one is to think of changes as alterations, how can they happen without altering the very identity of the subject of change? This research certainly cannot provide the answers to the questions that haunted Greek philosophers, but as we begin a story of organisational change, it may be useful to keep them in mind. The purpose of this chapter is to build up a theoretical framework and to develop a vocabulary for further analysis of organisational change in the United Nations. In trying to influence organisational change, donors act according to a particular understanding of change, which implies that external influence would make organisations change from one state to the other. William’s sketch from the previous chapter, for example, also builds up on this view: change there involves a change in equilibrium conditions from one gradient to another. Some scholars, however, have argued that organisations experience continuous change and that such distinct changes do not occur. The former view is associated with episodic theories of change that focus on structure, and the latter view—with process theories of change that focus on agency. Section 2.1 will explore both sets of theories and will attempt to reconcile the structure and the agency views. Section 2.2 will introduce the concept of sensemaking and justify the use of the sensemaking perspective in this research. Section 2.3 will assemble a theoretical model and a set of concepts that will serve as the main tools in the upcoming analysis. Section 2.4 will address the relevance and limitations of the theoretical framework and the academic and societal relevance of this thesis. The theoretical
chapter concludes with revisiting the research question: How do donors affect organisational change in the United Nations? 2.1 Episodic and Process Theories of Organisational Change The underlying assumption of the classical, linear approach to change is that it involves a series of predictable steps: a ripe banana changes colour from green to yellow, a new supermarket replaces the old corner shop, a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. This view prioritises stability of concepts, structures, and states and posits that nature consists of changeable interrelations among stable, unchanging units of existence (Rescher, 1996). When change occurs, it is episodic and often intentional as it is argued to be triggered by distinct, identifiable events (Wee & Taylor, 2018). Organisational theories of change associated with the linear approach are often described as episodic. Episodic theories argue that change occurs during “periods of divergence” (or episodes) when organisations are moving away from their equilibrium conditions (Weick & Quinn, 1999, p.365). The divergence is driven by external environmental demands and the role of the organisational management is to align organisational structure to a changing environment.
One of the most famous models within the classical school of thought is Kurt Lewin’s model of change that perceives organisational change as involving three steps: unfreezing, changing and refreezing (Lewin, 1947). In Lewin’s model, the management has to prepare the organisation to accept that change is necessary (unfreeze), introduce a new way of doing things (change), and help organisational members to institutionalise the changes (freeze). Robert Marshak has compared Lewin’s change model to “Newtonian physics where movement results from the application of a set of forces on an object” (Marshak, 1993 quoted in Weick & Quinn, 1999, p.372). It is therefore perfectly compatible with the view that donors can influence organisational change by exerting pressure on organisational structure. If change in organisations is understood as episodic, then donors can trigger certain mechanisms of change that would result in United Nations organisations adapting to donor demands.
In contrast to the episodic view of change, the process view builds on the idea of continuous change. In his lecture at the University of Oxford on The Perception of Change, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, argued that “usually we look at change, but we do not see it” (Bergson, 1911, p.154). Bergson thinks that nature does not consist of changeable interrelations among stable entities but instead may be described as a continuous flow of
events. The leap from entity to process is present in the works of writers as diverse as William Christian, Alfred North Whitehead and Karl Marx. These thinkers see processual nature of reality as the starting point for exploring socio-technical phenomena: “how an entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (Whitehead, 1978, p.35, emphasis in the original).
In organisational theory, the idea of continuous change was developed by Karl Weick in his classic work The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick, 1979). The central message of Weick’s book is that organisation is not a static structure but a process, and it is therefore continuously evolving, regenerating and transforming. To reinforce this dynamic image, Weick defines an organisation as organising. For Weick (1979), verbs are better suited for describing organisations than nouns (p.44), because verbs can better capture the fluidity of life: “People who think with verbs are more likely to accept life as ongoing events into which they are thrown, and less likely to think of it as turf to be defended, levels of hierarchy to be ascended, or structures to be upended.” (Weick, 1995, p.188)
Process philosophy has influenced many scholars of organisational change (Pettigrew, 1992, Orlikowski, 1996; Chia, 1999; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Carlsen, 2006) and in particular has given rise to the incremental model of change. In this model, innovation, imagination and improvisation are woven into everyday activities of an organisation that have potential to either reproduce or alter existing organisational features (Argyris & Schön, 1996). Observing change in everyday practices allows scholars to, perhaps, most vividly visualise continuous organisational change. According to the incremental view, the adaptations and alterations enacted by organisational members give rise to micro-level changes. Eventually, “ongoing local improvisations” (Orlikowski, 1996, p.90) result in accumulating and evolving change. For example, a case-study of a student-housing department shows that overtime, routines such as hiring, training or budgeting undergo substantial changes and that changes in one routine often lead to changes in others and accumulate to construct a greater change (Feldman, 2000). The internal dynamics of change in routines may be therefore seen as a source of continuous organisational change.
The continuous flow of organisational change, however, does not imply that the change is regular and even. On the contrary, Weick (1979) argues that Heraclitus’ river flow
metaphor is less accurate in describing change than that of “multiple, heterogeneous flows of diverse viscosity moving at variable rates” (p.42). The idea of continuous movement does not impose on the research the assumption that organisations undergo uniform gradual change (Bakken & Hernes, 2006). Far from being uniform, the changing reality of organisations may be described as jazz improvisation that comes into being in a stream of common experiences (Langenberg & Wesseling, 2016). Like musicians in a jazz orchestra, different parts of organisations interact with each other while remaining independent. Due to the continuous interaction among different organisational elements, organisational transformation is an inherently creative process and the direction of change is erratic and not easy to anticipate. Informed by Weick’s work, Chia (1999) presents a “rhizomic” model of organisational change. In biology, a rhizome is a plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes in different directions. Unlike a root tree that grows in a predictable fashion, the rhizome expands in a “heterogeneous collective assemblage of occurrences” (Chia, 1999, p.222). The basic principle of the model is that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze quoted in Chia, 1999, p.222). In simpler terms, any organisational development can feed into any other development. The rhizomic conception of change is not only continuous but also non-linear and unexpected:
“Change is subtle, agglomerative, often subterranean and heterogeneous. It spreads like a patch of oil. Change takes place by variations, restless expansion, opportunistic conquests, sudden captures and offshoots. Rhizomic change is anti-genealogical in the sense that it resists the linear retracing of a definite locatable originary point of initiation.” (Chia, 1999, p.222, emphasis in the original)
Change in this model cannot be traced to a single point of origin and it does not unravel in a certain direction. Overall, process scholars portray organisational change as continuous, inherently novel and unpredictable. The main differences between episodic and continuous organisational change are summarised in the table below.
Episodic Change Continuous Change
Metaphor of
organisation Organisations are inertial and change is infrequent, discontinuous, intentional.
Organisations are emergent and self-organising, and change is constant, evolving, cumulative.
Analytical
framework Change is an occasional interruption or divergence from equilibrium. It tends to be dramatic and it is driven externally. It is seen as a failure of the organisation to adapt its structure to a changing environment. Key concepts: structure, triggering, equilibrium, divergence, discontinuity, environmental demands. Change is a pattern of endless modifications in work processes and social practice. It is driven by organisational instability and alert reactions to daily contingencies. Numerous small accommodations cumulate and amplify. Key concepts: agency, practices, recurrent interactions, emergent patterns, improvisation, unpredictability. Intervention
theory The necessary change is created by intention. Change is Lewinian: inertial, linear, progressive, goal seeking, motivated by disequilibrium, and requires outsider intervention. The change is a redirection of what is already under way. Change is Confucian: cyclical, processional, without an end state, eternal. Figure 4—Comparison of episodic and continuous change (Source: adapted from Weick & Quinn, 1999, p.366) Weick notes that one the central differences between the two views of organisational change is perspective. The episodic theory adopts a macro, distant, global perspective and the continuous theory—micro, close, and local one (Weick & Quinn, 1999). The analysis of organisational change from the macro perspective may not be the same as micro-level analysis. In an example first used by Gregory Batison (1979), one may consider an acrobat on the tight rope. From the spectator’s perspective, the acrobat is perfectly stable, but from a different perspective, he is continually correcting his imbalance and adjusting his posture through the unnoticeable movement of his muscles and joints. Like the stability of an acrobat, the stabilised conception of reality is generated by constant movement and change. An organisation that looks stable from the outside world may be experiencing continuous change from within. Inspired by this line of thinking, this thesis perceives change as continuous but does not fully dismiss the episodic view of change. In order to gain a better understanding of how change is actually “accomplished on the ground” (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p.568) in an international bureaucratic organisation, it is useful to adopt the continuous view of change. Furthermore, it allows to construct a comprehensive account of how organisations respond to pressures for change and therefore to understand the mechanisms of donor influence on organisations. The process-orientated approach to
studying organisational change necessitates focusing on situated human agency and the role of the individual, which will be examined further in the next section.
2.2 Individuals and Organisational Change: Introducing Sensemaking
The previous section introduced the episodic and the continuous views of organisational change and suggested that the in-depth exploration of the dynamics of change calls for alignment with the latter. This section explores the role of the individual in an organisation based on the assumption that organisational members function within flows of ongoing events. The role of the individual in a continuously changing organisation is twofold. First, according to the incremental model already introduced on this chapter, individual action is inseparable from the organisation. The structuration theory of Anthony Giddens (1984) provides the logic for understanding the relationship between individuals and organisations. Organisations are “constituted by the ongoing agency of organizational members, and have no existence apart from such action” (Giddens quoted in Orlikowski, 1996). Process scholars use insights from ethnomethodology to emphasise the importance of human action and social interaction to understanding structural categories like that of an organisation (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002, p. 576). Consequently, process theories often focus on the practices within organisations (Argyris & Schön, 1996; Feldman, 2000) and locate change in the everyday interactions and activities of organisational members. According to Weick himself, “interdependencies among people are the substances of organisation” (Weick, 1979, p.13). But this is not the only reason why the role of the individual is so important. Weick (1979) suggests that organisation is both a multitude of processes and the way individual organisational members make sense of these processes. According to Weick, the unpredictability of organisations gives rise to a need for explanation and order. Individuals struggle to process continuous change and tend to break the processes up into individual episodes that have boundaries and are therefore easier to comprehend. In other words, people in organisations try to sort chaos “into items, events, and parts which are then connected, threaded into sequences, serially ordered, and related” (Weick, 1979, p. 148). This process of ordering the flux of action is called sensemaking and it helps to deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty of organisations. In the case of ambiguity, people engage in sensemaking because they are confused by too many interpretations, whereas in the case of uncertainty they do so because they do not have any interpretations (Weick, 1995, p.91). Weick also use the term equivocality to underline the idea that organisational action permits
multiple meanings. Confronted with the equivocal streams of experience, organisational members search for answers to the question “what’s the story?” (Weick et al, 2005). The stories they construct momentarily impose some order on these streams. At the same time, settling for a certain understanding of the events and acting upon it brings the story into existence. According to this constructivist line of reasoning, individual subjective interpretations become objectified via actions. When an individual acts upon his understanding of reality, the material world coheres in a new way that becomes open to interpretation to other organisational members. Other individuals also act upon their understanding, which may verify or challenge the original interpretation. Sensemaking is the primary site where “meanings materialise that inform and constrain identity and action” (Mills, 2003 quoted in Weick et al, 2005) and consequently, the sensemaking perspective can help to the key to understand how ideas are translated into action and how they get modified, changed and institutionalised in organisational structures.
Organisational theory offers a multitude of concepts to capture the interaction among cognitive processes, actions of individuals and social structures. The concept of framing analysis (Rein & Schön, 1977; Hajer & Laws, 2006) presents an alternative way of articulating the logic of sensemaking. The constructs related to framing frequently encountered in the literature include those of script (Abelson, 1976 quoted in Gagliardi, 1990), schema (Bartlett, 1932 quoted in Gagliardi, 1990) and theories-in-use (Argyris & Schön, 1979). This theoretical framework builds upon Weick’s (1979; 1995) model of sensemaking because it provides a comprehensive account of change that reconciles micro and macro levels. Secondly, it reconciles agency with the importance of institutional structure and, in doing so, incorporates meaning and cognitive processes of individuals into organisational theory (Weick et al, 2005, p. 419). Finally, the sensemaking perspective offers a social theory of organisational change, in which not only actions, but also interactions among individuals are important, which is particularly appropriate for an organisational setting. The properties and characteristics of the sensemaking model are explored in greater detail in the next section.
2.3 From Sensemaking to Organising
Section 2.2 introduced the sensemaking perspective and Section 2.3 develops it further to examine how exactly sensemaking contributes to the process of organising. Weick (1979) introduces three concepts to describe sensemaking in organisations: enactment, selection and retention. In the previous section, it has been argued that continuous organisational change is difficult for individuals to experience because it creates states of disorder, in particular uncertainty and ambiguity. Individuals seek to resolve uncertainty and ambiguity and to acquire a sense of what has been happening. Weick (1979) summarises his model in a simple sentence: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” According to this logic, “saying” something precedes “seeing” or understanding what has been said, and “seeing” results in “knowing” or having experience of the situation (Figure 5). The acquired knowledge then affects what will be “said” and “seen” in the future. The processes of enactment, selection and retention are related to each other in a similar fashion. Individuals undertake action (enactment), which precedes acquiring an understanding of this action and the situation they are facing (selection). This understanding is retained in their minds forming the basis for new acts and interpretations (retention). Let’s now look into the three stages of sensemaking in detail. Figure 5—Enactment, Selection, Retention (Source: Weick, 1979, p.134) The separate analysis of sensemaking stages is difficult because sensemaking never starts (Weick, 1995, p.43). Although the sensemaking formula begins with enactment, this stage presupposes that previous cycles of sensemaking have taken place. Enactment refers to the ways in which organizational members do not simply react to their environment, but help to enact it in the same way that legislators enact laws (Kudesia, 2017, p.10). In Weick’s theory, the concept of enactment, somewhat confusingly, entails two analytically different processes. The first one entails breaking the flow of undifferentiated action and through this act isolating a specific part of experience. Weick compares the flow of action to a verbatim
out a portion of the text or ignoring other parts of it, a reader creates a certain extract and then uses it to gain some indication of what he is reading. Individuals in organisations create something to make sense of in a similar fashion: enactment incorporates activities of noticing and bracketing (Weick, 1979). For example, a nurse during her routine activities notices new symptoms in a patient (example adapted from Weick et al, 2005, p.410). She focuses her attention on some symptoms, such as a low heart rate, but may leave others unnoticed therefore bracketing the stream of information and imposing a category of symptoms on those portions that are set apart. Through focusing her attention on particular symptoms, the nurse forms an initial sense of the issue. When the nurse later selects her interpretation for what the issue could be, it will be based upon the symptoms she singled out. In Weick’s own words noticing and bracketing involves extracting cues. Extracted cues are “simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring” (Weick, 1995, p.50). The enactment in this case thus occurs through perception and creates an input for the selection process.
The enactment process also occurs through behaviour (Kudesia, 2017, p.10). Once individuals select an interpretation, they act it out through speech and action.4 By doing so,
individuals embed their interpretations in the environment. Enactment is therefore a process of constructing reality for the actor as opposed to simply discovering the underlying reality. The concept of enactment as it is understood in this framework, however, does not imply that there is no underlying, but rather suggests that the features of the reality are not fixed and are continuously shaped by the types of action in which individuals engage. Selection defined as “the imposition of various structures on equivocal displays as an attempt to reduce their equivocality” (Weick, 1979, p.131). The purpose of selection is to provide an explanation for the equivocal data generated from the enactment process or, in other words, to determine what the bracketed information means. In the selection process, individuals select specific meanings and interpretation schemes for words, actions and other happenings they encounter. The need for selection arises from the fact that a single event may have a multitude of meanings. The interpretation process involves “fleshing out” the initial sense generated in the enactment process and “developing it into a more complete and narratively organized sense of the […] situation” (Sandberg et al, 2015, p.14). The chosen 4 The idea of enactment resonates with the key role of action in the suggested theoretical framework,
but it is not limited to active intervention. On the contrary, enactment may also imply ignoring, abandonment or postponing—these actions are also constitutive of reality even if they do not produce a visible outcome (Weick, 1995, p.37).
interpretation depends on the accounts of experiences previously acquired by the actor. At the same time, the new interpretation is retained in the memory and becomes related to past experience. Once the interpretation is retained, it may be used in the future as a source for further selection and action. Consequently, selection produces a plausible understanding of what the environment means that can serve as a guide for enactment (Kudesia, 2017, p.10). Retention is defined as the “storage of the products of successful sensemaking” (Weick, 1979, p.131). The interpretations and enactments generated in the sensemaking process are stored in the memory as cause maps and interpretation schemes for future use (Weick, 1979). Retention has a direct influence on future enactment and selection. Unless a “sense” is retained, it will not be possible to match it to a situation in the future in order to make sense of that situation. Retained understandings are not only believed, but may also be doubted thus creating negative and positive feedback loops (Weick, 1979, p.133). In a positive loop, actors interpret and enact information in routine familiar ways and in a negative loop they discredit their memory in the selection process. Weick urges organisational members to find a right balance between belief and doubt: sometimes to act decisively individuals need to discredit equivocal information and sometimes even when there is no equivocality there may be good reason to question the enacted environment (Weick, 1979, p.221).
Taken together, sensemaking can be seen as a process through which individuals resolve the ambiguity and uncertainty in their environment through a series of actions, which entail noticing and bracketing information about the environment, selecting interpretation schemes for that information, and then enacting their interpretations to bring order to the environment (Weick, 1979). For clarity purposes, sensemaking has so far been conceptualised at the individual level, but according to Weick (1979), organisational sensemaking has to happen at the social level because organisations are too complex for one individual to comprehend. In an organisation, enactment, selection and retention are distributed among organisational members and across different levels of analysis. Individual sensemaking constitutes the intrasubjective level of analysis where sensemaking primarily relies on retained interpretation schemes. There are three levels of sensemaking “above” the individual level: the intersubjective, the generic subjective and the extrasubjective (Wiley, 1988 quoted in Weick, 1995, pp. 70-72).
At the intersubjective level, the self gets transformed from “I” into “we”. Organisational members interchange and synthesise interpretation schemes and enactments to construct a shared meaning of social reality. This is the level where employees
come into frequent contact with each other that roughly corresponds to the department level in organisations. The generic subjective level implies the generic self that replaces individualised selves. Generic subjectivity takes the form of scripts defined as “standard plots of types of encounters whose repetition constitutes the setting’s interaction order” that are embedded in organisational artefacts (Weick, 1995, p.71). The extrasubjective level of analysis is the cultural level of “pure meanings” conceptualised as an “abstract idealized framework derived from prior interaction” (Ibid., p.72). Organisational change in Weick’s theory is defined through the interaction among different levels of sensemaking. The role of sensemaking is to simultaneously coordinate the flow of action through imposing generic meanings and to construct innovative interpretations of organisational reality. 2.4 Conceptual Tools: Organisational Plans, Artefacts and Practices The conceptualisation of organising offered in Section 2.3 gives new meaning to the elements that constitute organisations. Anticipating upcoming analysis, this section redefines organisational phenomena in interpretative terms. Goals and plans Within the context of his model, Weick (1979) argues that people converge first on issues of means not issues of ends (p.91). Even when they are acting collectively people may have divergent goals. Building on activity system research, Yrjö Engelström (1999) argues that actors in complex systems do not necessarily construct a connection between the goals of their individual actions and the possible objective of the collective activity (p.173). That understanding of common aspirations may come later or not at all. Organisational action should thus be understood as “goal-interpreted” and not goal-governed:
“Goals are sufficiently diverse, the future is sufficiently uncertain, and the actions on which goal statements could center are sufficiently unclear, that goal statements explain a relatively small portion of the variance in action.” (Weick, 1979, p.239) Consequently, organisational plans are understood not as an orderly conception of future action, but as “symbols, advertisements, games and excuses for interactions” (Cohen and March, 1974 quoted in Weick, 1979, p.10). To outsiders, plans show organisation at its
best thus performing an advertisement function. Within the organisation, they induce conversations about projects and help individuals modify each other’s ideas about what should be done. Plans are also a way of signalling intentions; furthermore, announcing a plan may be more important than actualising it because of the symbolic value that making a commitment holds (Weick, 1979, p.10). Through talking about the future, plans help organisational members to negotiate the meaning of the present.
An interesting observation about plans is that in the context of ambiguity and uncertainty, the substance of the strategic plan is less important than the fact that it can initiate and guide action (Weick, 1995, p.54). Once people begin to act (enactment), they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in social context, and this helps them to retrospectively discover what is occurring, what needs to be explained and what should be done next. Plans begin to orient people and instil confidence in action, and the quality of the original plan is of secondary importance. This also implies that the realisation of the plan can often deliver something different than originally intended, as unpredictable change emerges from the streaming of organisational life.
Artefacts
Organisational objects, documents, stories and websites serve as community or cultural artefacts. The concept of artefact comes from cultural anthropology, but Dvora Yanow (2003) makes a strong argument for using cultural metaphors in the study of organisations. The term culture applied to organisations enables to see organisational reality through the prism of “ex post inference” (Yanow, 2003, p.35), which is also identified as the logic behind sensemaking. Although this thesis does not adopt the vocabulary of the cultural perspective in organisational theory in full, the notion of artefacts is borrowed to reinforce the meaning-centered focus of organising. The use of the term artefact intends to direct attention to the meanings embedded in objects and to suggest that they can perform functions other than their practical function. From the Weick’s (1979) model it follows that artefacts perform a retention function. At the collective level, enacted environments and interpretation schemes are retained in the form of manuals, budgets, or reports. These documents contain generic meanings that help to impose order and structure and which organisational members can consult in the future. The role of artefacts is therefore is to help organisational members to make sense of organisational processes. The same line of thinking may be found in Argyris & Schön’s
(1978) model, where it is argued that artefacts act as representations of cognitive maps or mental models formed at the organisational level. For example, a schematic drawing of office space can reveal patterns of communication and control (Argyris & Schön, 1978 quoted in Gagliardi, 1990, p.17). Secondly, artefacts may also function as plans or as symbols of desired direction of change that help organisational members to negotiate the meaning of change. To illustrate this function, Pasquale Gagliardi (1990) gives an example of a new office building design that “can reflect the cultural changes hoped for by the top management rather than the traditional values of the organization” (p.26). Such a setting would expose the conflicts among different organisational realities—the tension that is inherent in the process of change. In my personal experience at the United Nations premises, I have seen how this tension can materialise in the form of posters protesting against the introduction of flexible workspace environment. Practices The process view adopted in this thesis is associated with the focus on action and practice. In the suggested framework, the everyday activities of organisational members are seen as a source of continuous organisational change. Attention is directed to what individuals do, the temporal organisation of such actions, the artefacts that guide them and the resources that make them possible (Nicolini et al, 2003). The term practices has been used interchangeably with the term routines (Feldman, 2000), however, in this research it is argued that routine and novelty are intertwined in practice, so such substitution may be misleading. For the purpose of this research, organisational activities such as team meetings, reporting, and financial accounting are understood as practices through which meaning is negotiated and organisational change is enacted. The term routines is used only when it is necessary to underline the stable, generic nature of a practice.
2.5 Relevance and Limitations of the Thesis Section 2.5 looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical framework used in this thesis as well as its societal and academic relevance. The process view of change and the sensemaking perspective adopted in this research naturally give rise to certain theoretical limitations. First, Weick’s model is retrospective in character and it does not allow for the possibility of forward thinking. The model leaves out the phenomenon of anticipating, which is central to many practice and process based theories. Anticipating what may come next is a “distinguishing aspect of the temporality of human existence”, therefore the heavy emphasis that Weick puts on retrospect may underestimate the “inherently forward looking, anticipative stance that practitioners adopt in their practices” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2014, p.24). Secondly, it has been argued that the continuous change framework does not provide an adequate explanation for the moments of stability (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2014). Unlike the episodic model of change, which posits that “change occurs during periods of divergence when organizations are moving away from their equilibrium conditions” (Weick and Quinn, 1999), the continuous model of change does not allow for the equilibrium to ever be established. The defenders of the process view have, however, argued that the ongoing processes of change in organisations should not be taken to mean that organisations constantly change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Continuous change does not always become institutionalised. Furthermore, thinking back to the example of the acrobat on the tight rope, the perceived stability of organisations may be the issue of perspective. The sensemaking perspective remains a very influential perspective in organisational studies (Brown et al, 2015; Langenberg & Wesseling, 2016; Tsoukas, 2017) and the concept of sensemaking has developed and changed over time. As Jörgen Sandberg and Haridimos Tsoukas write: “It [sensemaking] started out being used within a primarily cognitivist perspective, although, over time, it has acquired more constructivist nuances. Whereas in the cognitivist version, sensemaking leads to the formation of shared mental cause maps, in the constructivist version, sensemaking leads to actionable intersubjectivity constructed through language.” (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2014, p.9)
In building up this theoretical framework I combined Weick’s earlier and later works, for example the focus on intersubjectivity and generic subjectivity comes from Weick’s more recent book on Sensemaking in Organisations (1995) and the concepts of enactment, selection and retention come from his earlier work (Weick, 1979). In doing so, I attempted to construct a framework for analysing sensemaking in organisations without completely losing the cognitivist elements that offer insight into individual action. Secondly, I tried to distant myself from a purely constructivist approach and assumed the existence of an underlying reality and underlying organisational change processes that individuals make sense of, with which some readings of Weick may disagree.
Weick’s model has lent itself to different interpretations and applications: according to a recent review of organisational studies literature, the sensemaking perspective has been applied in 37 different areas and has been most frequently applied in strategy and organisational change (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2014). With the continuous increase in the amount of data and information available to individuals today that contributes to a rise in uncertainty and ambiguity, I believe that the sensemaking approach will only become more relevant. The continuous change model and the sensemaking perspective were originally conceived for the analysis of non-bureaucratic, innovative organisations (Weick & Quinn, 1999). This thesis seeks to extend the sensemaking framework and to show that in the modern age, continuous change does not cease to exist in bureaucracies. I therefore pick a non-conventional case study—the United Nations—and I hope to find evidence that ambiguity driven micro changes in practices do occur in international bureaucracies.
The central contribution of this study to the field of organisational change will be in exploring the influence of an external factor within the endogenously defined model of organisational change. The more traditional approach would be to adopt the Lewinian model that specifically focuses on the influence of external factors, while the sensemaking model makes the analytical distinction between endogenously and exogenously generated change redundant, since the response to any influence is argued to be dependent on an organisation’s self-understanding (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). I suggest that the influence of external factors can still be identified in the sensemaking model, for example in the way they provide the discursive resources or cues for the process of sensemaking. Focusing on how individual actors extract or do not extract those cues will provide interesting insights into the mechanisms of organisational change. This thesis thus aims to provide an illustration to how external influence becomes (or does not become) internalised through organisational processes. The case of Rome-based agencies in particular is interesting, because it provides
scope for observing the process of sensemaking in three distinct organisations with partly overlapping mandates. Future research could explore this case further with a specific focus on how the relationship between sensemaking and organisational identity.
Finally, Weick (1995) suggests that as people become aware of the processes that have been fully automatic, they will consciously incorporate more subtlety and richness into their actions and that would improve the quality of organisational life (p.182). Although sensemaking in itself is not a normative concept, they ways people engage in sensemaking can have positive or negative consequences for an organisation. For this reason, this research aspires to serve a societal purpose: the suggested understanding of organisational change may be useful to the members of international organisations. As Chris Argyris argues, being a policy science, organisational theory should generate “actionable” propositions (Argyris, 2003). Actionable knowledge is knowledge that actors, in this case, organisational members, can use to implement effectively their intentions. In that regard, the present thesis can be useful for two reasons. First, the concept of enacted environments suggests that constraints are at least partly of one’s own making (Weick et al, 2005). This view may help to rethink the issue of control in general and of donor influence in particular. According to the sensemaking perspective, the agency available to organisational members in implementing strategic changes may be much more influential than they think. Secondly, Weick’s theory posits that innovations in organisations occur at the intersubjective level: organisations are only making sense of change if they are talking to themselves (Weick, 1979). The research therefore underlines the importance of sufficient communication among different departments as well as among individual workers.
2.6 Revisiting the Research Question
The research question asks: How do donors influence organisational change in the United Nations system? First, by asking a how rather than a what question, this thesis aims to emphasise the process-based view of organisational change. While donors and organisational members largely understand organisational change as episodic, a change of perspective allows this study to focus on the continuous and open-ended change happening within the organisation. Secondly, this chapter has sought to show that organisations are dealing with continuous equivocal change and that they are grounded in the process of sensemaking. To influence organisational change therefore means to influence organisational sensemaking. It is important to note that donors do not necessarily seek to
influence continuous organisational change and that their understanding of change may differ from the one suggested in this thesis. Third, this research is on Rome-based agencies’ member-states that provide large proportions of earmarked funding, hence the term donors should be understood as a specific group of donors. While I would suggest that the mechanism of influence is the same for other groups of donors, proving this suggestion would require further research. Finally, since the suggested theoretical framework is non-linear, the way donors can influence sensemaking is indirect. Donors can influence organisational change through providing cues that organisational members can extract and enact thus acting out donor preferences.
Building on the understanding outlined in the preceding paragraph and on the theoretical framework discussed in this chapter, the research question will be addressed in four steps. First, I will explore the extra subjective level to understand the ideational context of sensemaking in the United Nations. Second, I will examine the generic subjective level and investigate organisational structural elements that embed generic meanings. The main discussion will be focused on the interaction between the generic and the intersubjective levels of sensemaking level in order to understand how organisational meanings are socially constructed and enacted among organisational members. It is in the context of this interaction that organising processes take place according to Weick’s theory and that donors can exercise their influence on sensemaking. I will therefore explore how donors can influence sensemaking process and discuss the factors that can limit their influence. Finally, I will explore how individuals make sense of organisational processes and what role intrasubjective sensemaking plays in organisations including. In bringing different parts of the research findings together I will attempt to answer three questions: 1) How can donors influence organisational sensemaking? 2) What is the extent of donor influence? 3) How can individual organisational members influence the sensemaking process?
2.7 Chapter Summary
The distinction between the two views of organisations—as social entities and as social processes—is a critical ontological distinction about the nature of organisations (Van de Ven & Marshall, 2005). This chapter has built upon the understanding of organisations as social processes and argued that organisations are characterised by continuous change. In the suggested theoretical framework, the ongoing and unpredictable change results in ambiguity and uncertainty that organisational members have to make sense of in their pursuit of provisional stability. Organisation itself is essentially an attempt to deal with the complexity and continuity of change: it acts against the forces of change, not with them (Chia, 1999, p. 224). Organisations were perceived as “enacted” in the sense that organisational members jointly act according to their interpretation of preceding actions. In doing so, they may construct new meanings and interpretation schemes or reinforce the old ones. The specific of organisational environment is the tension between the innovation of the new intersubjective meanings and the control of generic meanings, while the success of an organisation is associated with finding the right balance between the two.
The unpredictability of organisational change and the ambiguity of organisational environment begins to shine a light on why William—the donor representative introduced in Chapter One—did not acknowledge that his agency could influence United Nations organisational change. The theoretical framework used in this chapter suggests that the donor influence is more subtle and indirect. For analytical purposes the research question may now be restated as: How do donors influence organisational sensemaking in the United Nations system? Since organisational sensemaking plays out on four levels, this case study sets out to explore how these levels are interconnected, at what levels donors can influence the sensemaking process and what consequences this has for individual agency. In order to answer these questions through combining four levels of analysis, I require three types of data. First and foremost, I need to access the meanings and interpretative schemes constructed by organisational members. Secondly, in order to gain access to generic meanings, I need to analyse organisational artefacts that embed those meanings. Finally, I need to find sources that revealed information about the broader ideational context. Chapter Three will introduce the research design of this thesis and explain what methods I used for data collection and why I picked the case study strategy.
3. Research Design
The previous chapter introduced the theoretical framework in which this study is situated. The suggested framework builds upon Weick’s model of sensemaking (1979; 1995) and is structured around four analytical levels: the intrasubjective, the intersubjective, the generic subjective, and the extra subjective. The adopted theoretical approach distances this research from the “Newtonian style” of analysis: organisation is perceived as an ongoing reality-shaping process and not a solid and static entity. The theory chapter also sought to incorporate the lived experiences of organisational members into organisational analysis. In this research, the interactions between employees are seen as a source of innovative meaning construction, and generic meanings contained in artefacts—as sources of control and stability. Consequently, the theories that support this research lie within the domain of interpretive science and social constructivism. Although they do not necessarily deny the existence of underlying reality, they posit that the social world cannot be understood in the same way as the natural and the physical worlds. If humans construct meaning, then social science research must address what is meaningful to individuals in the social situation under study (Hatch & Yanow, 2003, p.66). The role of the researcher is thus to engage these meanings through various methods that allow access to actors’ cognitive processes and memories. According to Mary Jo Hatch and Dvora Yanow, this type of research is interpretative on three different levels: first, the situational actor and/or the researcher experience and interpret a certain process or setting. Secondly, the researcher interprets interviews with situational actors and organisational or related documents. Finally, the reader interprets the findings (Hatch & Yanow, 2003, p.70).
The research methodology required for the study of meanings and social constructions is necessarily “thick”, explanatory and inclusive because the views of each individual are unique and their understandings are subjective. The aim of research is to bring to light the processes of sensemaking in international organisations and to understand the meaning attributed to these processes by research subjects as well as the intersubjective, the generic subjective, and the extra subjective meanings. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the methodological components that together make up the research design for this thesis. The chapter begins with discussing why the case study strategy can be a useful vehicle for exploring context bound outcomes of organising. Section 3.2 introduces the research methods used for data collection. Section 3.3 discusses ethical considerations that guided me
throughout this research. The chapter concludes with the discussion of limitations of the research design. 3.1 Case Study Strategy: Why the Rome-Based Agencies? This research adopts a case study strategy in its exploration of contextualised sensemaking where the boundaries of the study in terms of research outcomes are not predefined. The case study is understood as a research strategy rather than a data collection technique because it offers a particular way of investigating an empirical topic. Cases help to develop a nuanced view of reality that does not limit the study of human behaviour to the search for linear causal mechanisms, which is consistent with the way of theorising about the processes of organisational change and sensemaking suggested in this thesis. The aim of this research is to investigate the “black box” of organisational change, which is traditionally described only in terms of inputs and outputs (O’Connor, 2015, p.32). For example, if donor preferences serve as the inputs and outcomes include a new type of agricultural development programmes, what happening in between and why don’t outcomes necessarily match the inputs? The case study strategy aims to describe mechanisms of donor influence on organisational change, however it may only describe the operation of mechanisms from empirical observations and create idealised characterisations of them using intuition to interpret the available evidence (Ackroyd & Karlsson, 2014, p.24).
According to Yin’s (2003) definition, case study is an “empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident” (Yin, 2003 p.9). Adopting the case study strategy thus helps to avoid the imposition of a strict phenomenon-context dichotomy on this research. In Weick’s (1995) model, context is associated with the extra subjective and the ideational levels of sensemaking, however, they are intrinsically connected with the intrasubjective, the intersubjective, and the generic subjective levels. Therefore, factors that would be perceived as ideational or organisational context in other types of research, in this thesis, constitute a part of organisational sensemaking processes. For example, United Nations system-wide developments would not be understood as sensemaking context, but rather as sensemaking at the generic subjective or the extra subjective levels that affects other levels of sensemaking. The case study strategy provided flexibility in the research design to move between the different levels of sensemaking and to clarify the phenomenon under study as the research unfolded.
It is traditionally argued that the two main limitations of the case study strategy that arise from its context dependence are the lack of applicability and the impossibility of generalisation (Flyvbjerg, 2004). Bent Flyvbjerg convincingly argues that “in the study of human affairs, there appears to exist only context-dependent knowledge, which thus presently rules out the possibility of epistemic theoretical construction” (Flyvbjerg, 2004, p. 421). According to this argument, in the study of human affairs, context dependent knowledge can be more valuable than the search for general theories and universals: “formal generalization is overvalued as a source of scientific development, whereas ‘the force of example’ is underestimated” (Flyvbjerg, 2004, p. 425). It does not mean, however, that case studies cannot contribute to the development of theories. On the contrary, the careful choice of cases contributed to the emergence of theories as diverse as the Marxist theory, Freud's psychoanalytic theories and even the natural science theories of Newton or Einstein (Flyvbjerg, 2004, p. 423). The present research aims to both produce an illustrative example of organising in the United Nations system and to contribute to the understanding of the processes of organisational change in international organisations. Rome-based agencies This research is based on the study of the Rome-based United Nations agencies: the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD), and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Together with 28 other organisations, the three agencies are part of the United Nations system that covers a wide variety of organisational activities with different institutional and functional structures. The three organisations are therefore studied as parts of the bigger system with the findings expected to indicate something about other United Nations organisations. The Rome-based UN agencies focus on enhancing food and nutrition security, responding to humanitarian crises and emergencies, promoting sustainable development, and reducing poverty at the global level. WFP positions itself as a humanitarian organisation fighting hunger, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. IFAD specifically focuses on providing concessional funding for agricultural development in developing countries. The activities of FAO are predominantly policy and research focused: the organisation distributes knowledge about food, agriculture and natural resources in the form of global public goods.
