“Public Administration meets Peacebuilding” Peace Operations as Political and Managerial Challenges

1 1 Principal drafters: Till Blume and Julian Junk, under the lead of Wolfgang Seibel – who is also heading the overall project – and with the assistance of Florian Roth and Johannes Cherbuliez. We are grateful to Susanna Pfohl Campbell, who provided her notes of the conference. David Antal proved invaluable for the finalization of this report. explored two largely neglected aspects of United Nations (UN) peace operations: the administrative side of peacebuilding and the political side of international administration. Key topics were coordination, leadership, and learning as managerial and political challenges. Each of these three factors was addressed by panels composed of scholars and practitioners. Papers and discussions on coordination confirmed and supplemented mainstream interpretations of managerial challenges posed by complex peace operations. Although nonhier-archical modes of coordination are crucial in the interorganizational networks that characterize peace operations, hierarchy and classic bureaucracy remain important, if not dominant, components. Rather than dwell on informal coordination in the form of networking, students of peace operations should acknowledge the role of tightly coupled chains of command and hierarchical accountability. The question of whether leadership as individual agency is a distinct component of management or rather an all-encompassing activity including effective coordination and successful learning remained unresolved during the conference. However, a widely shared view was that a mixture of social and political entrepreneurship, personal charisma, and political guidance constitutes the main ingredient of effective leadership in the framework of UN peace operations. The credibility of mandate enforcement, for instance, depends not only on determined and consistent action by leading field-level officials but also on continuous and unambiguous support from the UN Secretariat and the sponsoring nations. Learning is a pivotal notion shaping both the work of related departments of the UN Secretariat (e.g., the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, DPKO; and the Department of Political Affairs, DPA) and the perceptual patterns in the relevant literature. Triggered by the traumatic disasters of the 1990s (in Somalia, Rwanda, and Srebrenica, for instance), substantial progress has been made on the UN's strategic commitment to peacebuilding and its conceptualization. The relevant hallmarks of that advance are the Brahimi report (2000) and the final report of the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004). However, power asymmetries, organizational compartmentalization, and national or professional identities restrict learning in matters of field tactics and performance. Acceptance of second-best options may be the best that managers of …