“Beggars can’t be choosers.” “Money talks.” Your dissertation begins by invoking the enduring link between money and power. Why is this link important in global governance, and how does it play out in your research?

The link between power and money is everywhere in our daily lives, and it also drives so much of global governance today. Be it climate change, peacekeeping, or rolling out Covid-19 vaccines, countless global challenges come back to allocating finite resources to competing policy goals. I’ve been interested in unpacking the link between money and power in the specific setting of the international organization (IO). There, we find the power of money in action, but we also find organizational resilience against change. It’s all about change and continuity in IOs: Do changes in resource mobilization lead to changes in IOs’ governance? Or are IOs institutionally resilient against organizational change even if its funding changes?

What triggered your interest in the African Union (AU) specifically? What do your empirical findings mean for how to view Africa’s place in world politics?

The AU is a fascinating IO with a heated debate on funding reform, which lent itself ideally to observe changing resource mobilization in action. The dissertation finds that diversified IO resource mobilization overall has positive effects for the agency of the AU Commission. But the AU’s diversified resource mobilization is also a victim of its success. Lacking coordination between funders, fragmented capacity-building, and an over-insistence on balancing external funders curtail agency gains. These findings suggest that Africa can speak with one voice through the AU, but constantly needs to balance pan-African self-reliance norms with the continued need for external partnerships. This tightrope walk is essential to project ‘African agency’, as the literature calls it. Moreover, with a view to the study of IOs in our discipline, I wanted to contribute to normalizing the study of IOs in the Global South – attracted by easier access and better quantitative data, International Relations (IR) research still sidelines IOs headquartered outside the West all too often.

What are the main theoretical advancements of your research, and how do they help us better understand bureaucratic politics?

My theory develops four mechanisms that causally link the diversification of resource mobilization with agency changes of an IO secretariat. These mechanisms speak to the principal-agent analysis of IOs and make a novel theoretical contribution by combining group-level and dyadic effects. I argue that both the number of actors and the substantive content of individual relationships matter for understanding the effects of IO resource mobilization. Another main contribution is my focus on ‘agency of the IO secretariat’ as the dependent variable, a concrete organizational measure of how money changes IOs. This allows me to demonstrate that more money does not always mean more IO agency. For the study of bureaucratic politics, this all means that the ways bureaucracies interact with funders have an immense potential to change an organization.

Many international organizations are facing resource constraints, and your theory has wider potential applications. Where do you foresee this research agenda going forward?

Absolutely, the AU is an illustrative case of a broader phenomenon. More and more IOs diversify their resource mobilization to respond to a crisis of member states’ assessed contributions. My theory applies to other African IOs and IOs in the Global North. Many parts of the UN system, international courts, development banks and international NGOs all have seen diversified funding and modalities. One strand of future research will explain this phenomenon comparatively. I also want to unpack how IOs defend assessed contributions through sanctions. In addition, I will start a new line of research on African states’ agency and diplomatic strategies in different multilateral security processes.

How have your experiences at the Global Governance Centre, the Graduate Institute, and in International Geneva, shaped your research?

The Global Governance Centre was a fantastic community. A PhD project is, by definition, quite a solitary undertaking, so it was excellent to find a sense of belonging for this sometimes challenging period. Substantially, the permeability between academia and practice here at the Global Governance Centre and International Geneva at large is incredible. It certainly inspired me to write a doctoral thesis that strives for both theoretical and empirical relevance. These two goals genuinely are two sides of the same coin here at the Graduate Institute.

Ueli Staeger recently defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science at the Graduate Institute, entitled “Financing the African Union: Diversified resource mobilization and agency in international organization.” In August 2021, he joins the Department of Political Science and International Relations at University of Geneva as Maître-Assistant. Discover more about this research at www.uelistaeger.org.