International Public and NGO Management
One way to look at management in international organizations is to examine a single organization and see what its management issues are and how the organization confronts them (or not). A good case is the International Atomic Energy Agency, headquartered in Vienna, Austria. While I knew the Agency indirectly when I was with the United Nations in Vienna, I came to know it well when I was engaged to help develop management training programs for the Agency. In the process of doing that, I studied all of the Agency's departments and wrote a series of case studies, one of which (on the application of the sterile insect technique to eradicating the tsetse fly in Zanzibar) is a reading for this session. I was subsequently contracted to help the Agency apply matrix management techniques, develop results-based budgeting, to develop materials in self-evaluation for program and project managers and for Member State counterparts, to undertake a quality assessment of Agency evaluations, and to do a meta analysis of evaluation results through 2008. Together with a colleague, Berhanykun Andemicael (who was the Agency's representative to the United Nations for many years), I wrote a book entitled Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction: Prospects for Effective International Verification, published in 2005 by Palgrave, which examined the safeguards function in comparative perspective.
The IAEA, established in 1958 and having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, has a coherent mission and unique role. It was established at the height of the Cold War to provide an international framework for the regulation of nuclear energy that would not encourage proliferation of nuclear weapons. Thus,its first purpose was to assist in ensuring that nuclear weapons did not proliferate, that nuclear power was safe and that nuclear applications were disseminated intelligently. As its current mission statement says:
The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA):
For many years in the late 20th Century, the decline in public support for nuclear power, the growing problems of what to do with nuclear waste, the increasing threat of proliferation as technologies age and become more accessible have all provided challenges to the organization. At the same time, as public funds for nuclear research dried up, along with prospective careers, the Agency paradoxically became the place where the nuclear science community could interact. Perhaps more than any other international organization, the Agency is an intellectual leader in its field, rather than a mere packager of results developed elsewhere.
Its role in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has been an essential part of its work, but has grown in importance as a result of external developments. It is currently part of the process of dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons program, since the existing stocks of plutonium were under IAEA safeguards. It has been instrumental in arranging the solution for the questions about Iranian nuclear capabilities. Finally, it has become more engaged in trying to stop illegal transfer of nuclear material from theft, smuggling and sale to terrorists.
As the threat of climate change has grown in importance, nuclear power as the greenest of the economically-feasible sources of energy has re-emerged from its period of decline and solving the problems of safety, security, waste and technological innovation in that type of power generation has become a focus of the Agency's longer-term planning. The problems are interrelated and require time to solve.
The Agency has long had the reputation for being one of the best-managed of the organizations of the United Nations system.[1] Over its fifty-eight year history it has had only 4 Directors-General. The first served only four years, and the fourth was elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2005. This means that for most of its history it was managed by a Swedish scientist (Sigvard Eklund, from 1961 to 1981), a Swedish diplomat and lawyer (Hans Blix, from 1981 to 1997) and an Egyptian lawyer and diplomat (from 1998-2009). There was a continuity of leadership that permitted the Agency to mature relatively smoothly.[2]
The current Director-General is Yukiya Amano from Japan. A diplomat, he was Japan's Permanent Representative to the IAEA who had been chair of the Board of Governors. Since he was an outsider to the Agency, how well he has fared depended on his ability to understand the organization. He is said to be strongly committed to RBM and represents one source of executive leadership in international organizations, the diplomat promoted to manager..
His predecessor as Director-General, Mohammed El-Baradei from Egypt, was almost a career staff member of the Agency, having joined it in 1984. He was one of a growing number of executives of international organizations that have developed within the organization itself (another example is Kofi Annan, as Secretary-General of the United Nations.) This may reflect the maturing of international organizations and a realization by Member States that persons who have grown with the organizations can provide more effective leadership than outsiders. His abilities led to his sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with the Agency, and to survive an effort by the United States, in 2004, to replace him because he testified that there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq.
To look at an Agency, you have to see the functions it performs and the services it delivers, and judge them by the results they obtain.
Broadly speaking, the Agency s tasks can be summarized as follows:
Based on these tasks, the Agency is organized into six departments: Safeguards, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Applications, Technical Cooperation and Management. A Profile of the IAEA - Secretariat including a recent organizational chart can be found on the Agency website.
As part of the development of the Management
Certificate Curriculum (about which more later), I did an
analysis of what the Agency actually does. I coded the 1998
programme budget in terms of the function that was being
performed by each activity. While the Agency receives funds
from both assessed and extra-budgetary sources, the assessed
budget was taken as the best indicator of what the Member States,
as a whole, want the Agency to do.
As can be seen from
Table 2, all of the functions received budgetary allocations.
The largest amount is destined to norm enforcement, the most
autonomous of the functions and one that is based on existing
regimes. It reflects the importance of the treaty-based
regimes in safeguards and nuclear safety to the work of the
Agency. (While the total amount of budget has increased over the past 15 years, the relative sizes of functions have not changed.)
Table 2. Functions performed as a
proportion of the Regular budget of the Agency, 1998
Function |
Regular Budget 1998 |
Percent |
| Development |
39,626.0 |
18.2% |
| Internal
management |
52,853.0 |
24.2% |
| Mobilisation
of information |
33,926.0 |
15.5% |
| Norm
enforcement |
77,907.0 |
35.7% |
| Regime
creation |
13,930.0 |
6.4% |
| Total |
218,242.0 |
100.0% |
The performance of the functions cut across the programmes of the
Agency, although there is clearly some specialisation. Figure
1 shows the functions performed in terms of major programme, and
Figure 2 shows them by department.
The figures show that, with the exception of
the Technical Co-operation Department, all departments perform
more than one function, although there is clear specialisation in
functional terms. Of interest is the fact that the
Departments of Administration, Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Safety
each perform three or more different functions.
The technical nature of the Agency is can be
illustrated by comparing its functions with that of the United
Nations, a more broad-purpose organisation. Figure 3 shows
the relative amount of resources spent on different functions.
The Agency has a much higher percentage of resources destined to
norm enforcement, and a much lower percentage devoted to internal
management.
In order to perform
these functions, the Agency delivers specific services. These
can be classified in terms of what is actually produced or done
and illustrates what the public moneys that are spent on the
organisation buy . These services can be
considered to be what the Agency does, while the function
indicates why the services are being provided.
A total of seventeen types of services were identified as can be
seen in Table 3. These differ from the usual way in which
the Agency presents what it does in its budgets. Most programs in
fact produce a variety of outputs. The service categories
used in this analysis seek to look at the primary kind of product
delivered, measured both in terms of the output and the purpose
of the activity.
Table
3. Services provided as a proportion of the assessed Agency
budget, 1998
SERVICE |
Regular budget, 1998 |
Percentage |
| Administration |
39,115.5 |
17.9% |
| Advisory
Services |
4,776.0 |
2.2% |
| Collection
of information |
21,555.0 |
9.9% |
| Control |
11,337.5 |
5.2% |
| Conference
Servicing |
7,756.0 |
3.6% |
| Contracting |
3,979.5 |
1.8% |
| Coordination |
6,619.2 |
3.0% |
| Dissemination
of information |
15,188.0 |
7.0% |
| Finance |
9,530.5 |
4.4% |
| Inspection
Services |
40,946.0 |
18.8% |
| Legal
Services |
2,019.0 |
0.9% |
| Negotiation |
4,961.0 |
2.3% |
| Policy
Analysis |
8,523.7 |
3.9% |
| Research |
15,874.3 |
7.3% |
| Substantive
Servicing |
2,772.5 |
1.3% |
| Support
to technical cooperation |
18,241.2 |
8.4% |
| Training |
5,047.2 |
2.3% |
| Total |
218,242.0 |
100.0% |
Again, the difference between the Agency and
the United Nations can be seen in terms of the services provided
(Figure 4). Not only does the Agency provide more services,
including inspection and research, as well as most of the same
services provided by the United Nations, but it devotes a much
smaller proportion to providing administrative services to its
programmes.
Almost no major programme provides only a single service (Figure
5), nor does a single department have a monopoly over the types
of services being provided (Figure 6).
There is a rough correspondence between function and service, as
can be seen from Table 5. Advisory services comprise most
of the resources for development assistance; administration makes
up the bulk of services under internal management, and conference
servicing constitutes two-thirds of the services under regime
creation. However, under most functions, a variety of
services are provided. The broad nature of the categories
used clearly masks some of the services provided and the nature
of the budget masks others. For example, the work of
special representatives in providing negotiator services in the
context of peace and security is absent, since these are in the
main not financed from the regular budget, nor are most of their
specific administrative costs.
Table 5. Service by Functions, 1998
Service/Function |
Development |
Internal management |
Mobilization of information |
Norm enforcement |
Regime creation |
| Administration |
1.7% |
67.5% |
3.7% |
1.6% |
0.0% |
| Advisory
Services |
6.4% |
0.0% |
1.6% |
1.9% |
1.5% |
| Collection
of Information |
0.5% |
1.5% |
31.4% |
12.7% |
0.2% |
| Conference
Services |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
55.7% |
| Contracting
Services |
1.7% |
6.3% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
| Control |
2.2% |
18.2% |
0.0% |
1.1% |
0.0% |
| Coordination |
0.3% |
3.8% |
7.2% |
0.6% |
11.3% |
| Dissemination
of Information |
4.9% |
0.0% |
27.6% |
4.4% |
3.3% |
| Financing
of activities |
14.5% |
0.0% |
9.1% |
0.2% |
4.0% |
| Inspection
Services |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
52.6% |
0.0% |
| Legal
Services |
1.3% |
1.1% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
6.9% |
| Negotiation
Services |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
5.9% |
2.4% |
| Policy
Analysis |
3.7% |
0.0% |
8.0% |
4.1% |
8.3% |
| Research |
10.6% |
0.5% |
6.7% |
11.8% |
0.0% |
| Substantive
Servicing |
0.2% |
0.0% |
4.4% |
0.4% |
6.3% |
| Support
to Technical Cooperation |
45.5% |
0.0% |
0.2% |
0.2% |
0.0% |
| Training |
6.1% |
1.2% |
0.0% |
2.6% |
0.0% |
| Total |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
100.0% |
After completing the analysis, I posed the following question:
What are the implications of an analysis of functions and
services?
The first is that, while there are different functional emphases
in different major programmes and departments, in fact there is
less compartmentalisation than might be thought. Functionally,
there is one house .
Second, the same range of services is provided by many
departments, although perhaps in different ways. This
provides an opportunity for innovation and exchange that can
enrich the entire Agency.
Third, there is a clear need to build links between programmes to
take advantage of the common functions and services, to improve
effectiveness, promote innovation and maximise the use of
resources. Here, there is a need to build and improve
co-ordination, primarily of an informal kind, based on an
understanding of who is doing what, for whom and with which
purpose.
A further implication, not shown as such in the analysis, is to
use this kind of analysis to define services more precisely and
convincingly. This means identifying more precisely the
constituencies for which the services are intended, determining
whether the services reach that constituency and examining what
role the services perform in terms of the function in which they
are embedded. This exercise can help determine realistic
estimates of the outcomes that can be expected from providing the
services.
Finally, functions can be examined to see
what, over the medium- and longer-term, the Agency can be
expected to do. It can help lead to a kind of strategic
vision for the performance of each function that can help sharpen
and focus the planning and budgeting of services.
The Safeguards program is the largest in the Agency and involves the staff that establish and implement a treaty-based program to ensure that fissile material is not diverted from peaceful uses. This is done by maintaining an inventory of the material, based on national reporting according to Agency standards, inspections by Agency staff, and an increasing degree of remote monitoring (e.g. by way of video cameras). In the wake of the failure of the Agency to detect an undeclared nuclear weapons program in Iraq, the Secretariat proposed and, eventually, the Member States accepted an enhanced safeguards program based on increased access by Agency inspectors, upgrading surveillance equipment, a more modern database on inventoried material, improved training, among others. This has been embodied in an additional protocol to the NPT. However, except for voluntary contributions, there was no agreement to increase the resources of the safeguards program. Finally, El Baradei decided that there was no alternative and included an increase in the funding for safeguards in the 2002-2003 budget. In the wake of September 11 and the growing concern that terrorists could obtain nuclear material and convert them into weapons, the major contributors agreed to the Agency proposals. In the 2004-2005 programme budget these additional funds were included in the assessed budget, and when approved made the Agency almost the only organization of the UN System to have significant real growth. While growth has been constrained in the subsequent budgets, the Agency has continued to get at least zero real growth. Progress and issues are shown in a new report to the IAEA General Conference on Strengthening the Effectiveness and Improving the Efficiency of Agency Safeguards.
In its early, optimistic days, the Nuclear Energy program was about promoting use of that source, said to be the cleanest ( greenest ) of all sources. A series of accidents and disasters (Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukuyama) coupled with general public fear of that type of energy, has put the industry on a defensive path. There has been little new construction and, increasingly, older facilities are phasing out. This was encouraged by low prices for oil during the 1990 s, but is changing as oil prices increase and concerns about global warming become more prominent. The argument is made tht while nuclear reactors are relatively expensive to build, they are relatively inexpensive to run, in contrast with coal and oil-fired generating plants. In the meantime, the Agency works on showing the potential of nuclear energy, encouraging the development of smaller, safer reactors and providing information about the subject. They often highlight France, which gets over 75% of its energy from nuclear and exports some of this to neighbors.
The accidents have led to a greater emphasis on safety standards for nuclear reactors. Here the Agency has a variety of activities, including development of standards, providing assistance and sending teams out whenever an accident occurs in a State that has become party to the Nuclear Safety Convention. An additional line of work, growing in importance, is dealing with the problems of nuclear waste, a concern shared with the nuclear energy program. Since the 1970 s, there has been a move against reprocessing of depleted materials (the dominant model is "once through", a given amount of uranium can only be used once). The motivation for this is to prevent the creation of new fissile materials through reprocessing, but has two consequences: it ensures that an otherwise almost completely renewable energy source becomes unrenewable, and it produces a massive amount of radioactive waste that has to be put somewhere. And no country or community wants to receive radioactive waste. The Agency work is concerned with determining how to cope with this growing problem. The tsunami in Japan, which destroyed several nuclear reactors, has raised the issue of safety to a high level of priority and one of the events this year has been to determine how safety can be increased. For an update, see the report to the 2016 General Conference on Measures to Strengthen International Cooperation in Nuclear, Radiation, Transport and Waste Safety.
.
Finding peaceful uses for nuclear technology has been an Agency concern for some time. It is the service provided, in effect, to the non-nuclear states and is part of the bargain on which the Agency was founded. It includes, essentially, three types of activities. First, the Agency does some technological development itself, through laboratories run by the Agency in Seibersdorf in Austria and in Monaco. Out of these laboratories have come several key technologies (including the means for mass rearing of sterile insects). Second, it promotes development of new technologies through research grants to national institutions. Third, if provides technical support to a technical cooperation program administered by the Technical Cooperation Department. The variety of projects supported has led to concerns that the program lacks focus and direction. For an update, see the report to the General Conference in 2016 on Strengthening the Agency's Activities related to Nuclear Science, Technology and Applications.
The Agency is one of the last organizations to do classical technical cooperation (provision of expert advice, equipment and the like to support a national effort). It has a large voluntary technical cooperation fund that is maintained as part of a bargain between the nuclear States and the non-nuclear. It does not depend on other development agencies for funding, although it works with other programs. Part of the difficulty in managing the program is that much of the support comes from another department which may or may not agree about the projects and may or may not give support the emphasis that it wants.
From this overview, some of the main management issues being faced by the Agency can be seen. Others are more hidden.
In all complex organizations, coordination is a problem. There are main two approaches to dealing with the issue: formal coordination and informal. Formal means that there is, to the extent possible, a clean division of labor between different organizational units and the establishment of formal mechanisms to resolve problems should they occur. This Weberian ideal is almost never achieved, at least in part because:
In most complex organizations, coordination is informal (a telephone call or email here, an agreement among peers there). It is essentially non-hierarchical. But, it is not easy to control.
There is very little in the Agency s work that doesn t involve more than one organizational unit. Therefore effective coordination is a key to effective delivery of services. In the Agency there are several areas where coordination has been a problem:
The Agency has been blessed with good support from its Member States, but there is a concern that the political elements related to nuclear energy (such as the German decision to stop developing nuclear sources of energy as a result of the Greens joining the government, a policy that is being reviewed under the Merkel government) will uncut this support. The Agency response has been to provide Member States with convincing justifications for continued support through a management reform that includes results-based programming. To see how this works, see the report to the 2016 General Conference on the Agency's Budget Update for 2017.
When the Agency was established, it was thought that political considerations could be avoided if the staff were rotated automatically. The Agency Statutes preclude the offering of permanent contracts. It was assumed that the maximum term of service would be seven years and the rotation principle has been built into the personnel management system.
This was based on an assumption that national nuclear institutions would dominate and would provide a steady source of staff and that there were no inherent problems in continuity.
History has proven both of the assumptions to be incorrect. Increasingly, the Agency is the sole source of employment for certain skills (e.g. safeguards inspectors) and there has been a clear need for continuity, especially in terms of policy development. As a result, through long term contracts, several departments have a large number of career staff (Safeguards and Management), while others still are affected by rotation.
In effect, 10 percent of all managers are replaced every year by persons brought in from the outside.
A review of the evaluations of Agency programs undertaken since 2000 shows that about half of them noted the rotation policy as a problem affecting the ability of the Agency to deliver programs effectively.
In terms of human resources management, there are now three central problems:
To address these problems, the Agency has undertaken a number of innovations under the heading management reform .
In trying to find a middle ground between formal and informal methods of coordination, the Agency tried to adopt a method called matrix management . In effect, this involves setting up projects where staff are drawn from more than one department and project leaders report to more than one supervisor. It was first used in the Department of Technical Cooperation. As part of one of my assignments, I prepared an analysis of how matrix management could apply in the Agency. The initial reports from the pilot project in Technical Cooperation were that, once the fear of change has been dissipated, the approach could work. However, there was resistance from the middle management staff and when the Deputy Director-General for Technical Cooperation changed, the experiment -- as a formal procedure -- was abandoned.
As has been noted earlier, the Agency has adopted results-based programming. The program budget for 2002-2003 was prepared using the approach, as have the next seven biennial program budgets. The next stage in the program will be determining how to monitor progress. As was noted in the report of the UN Secretary-General that was reading for the session on internal management, how to do program performance monitoring in a results-based system is a difficult question. The Agency has tried to deal with it by preparing both end-of-biennium reports and by intermediate reports that can be used to influence consideration of next program budgets. It has set up an effective database into which results can be recorded systematically.
To deal with the issue of how to bring new managers into the Agency management culture , as well as to re-tool existing managers, the Agency has established a Management Certificate Curriculum (MCC), an intensive one-week training program with an initial overview and a concluding capstone session. By the end of 2001, all existing managers will have gone through the course. It was developed over a two-year period, is highly interactive and is one of the few management training programs that has been developed internally within an organization (as opposed to outsourcing). A significant number of managers were involved in the design and pilot testing of the curriculum and, as a result, it has broad acceptance among managers. It is designed around a single case, a program that the Agency does not yet have, but could have: the implementation of a new Fissible Materials Treaty.
The MCC is formally the responsibility of the Division of Personnel, but in fact it is managed by a faculty consisting of the facilitators who implement it. There is a dean of the faculty who has overall substantive responsibility. The current dean is the Director of Internal Oversight Services, who joined the Agency after a career with UNICEF.
The MCC was evaluated at some point, as part of a regular process whereby all major programs are evaluated at least once every six years, but in the meantime outside consultants have suggested changes. Starting in 2012, it has been replaced by a new management program.
The issue of how to measure performance is important in any institution, but is particularly critical in the Agency, where staff are hired on fixed-term contracts and extensions should be based on performance. The Agency has had a system called Work Planning and Progress Review (WPPR) in which, as in most UN system agencies today, a staff member works out an individual work plan with his or her supervisor at the beginning of the year and then is appraised on the basis of the extent to which the plan was implemented by the end of the year. Initially, this was based on self-reporting and fixed choice scales, but in the context of results-based programming is increasingly being based on contributions to the achievement of results in the program.
Put simply, the system is becoming based on defining a staff member s roles and tasks and then appraising performance on the basis of whether the results that the staff member committed her or himself to were actually obtained. If so, there is a reasonable basis for extension or other reward, if not, there is a basis for diagnosing why not and if it is the individual that is responsible, then there is a basis for not extending contracts or transferring the staff to another function.
As part of the Fiftieth Anniversary, El-Baradei began work on what he called a 2020 Vision, a long-term planning exercise. It started as an in-house exercise and then, in the Agency practice, was given to a Commission of Emminent Persons on the Future of the Agency. Their report was before the IAEA General Conference in September 2008. As it confronts how it can best adapt to its programmatic challenges, the Agency is an example of how management reform is applied to improving performance.
[1] While the Agency is part of the United Nations system it is not formally a specialized agency since these report to the Economic and Social Council. Because it reports to the Security Council, the IAEA is considered as a category in its own right. Thus, the term the specialized agencies and the IAEA is used.
[2] The period is well-described in the official history of the Agency: David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: the First Forty Years, Vienna, IAEA, 1997.