Learning to Deploy Civilian Capabilities: How the UN, EU and OSCE Have Changed Crisis Management Institutions

Full Text

As international organizations continuously deploy civilian capabilities as part of their peacekeeping and crisis management operations, they face significant challenges: not only are civilian deployments rapidly increasing in quantity, but civilian missions are also very diverse in nature.
HYLKE DIJKSTRA, PETAR PETROV and EWA MAHR compare developments in the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU) and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), three of the largest civilian actors in the field.
Drawing on the concept of organizational learning, they show that all three organizations have made significant changes over the last decade in their civilian capabilities. The extent of these changes, however, varies across these organizations, the authors write in the journal Cooperation and Conflict.
While the processes of change have differed – from the comprehensive Global Field Support Strategy in the UN, to practical solutions in the OSCE and incremental and institutional change in the EU – all three organizations have focused on changes based on previous experience.
“In addition, it is also clear that it has been easier to change and increase the resources for the civilian missions than the rules governing the use of resources. The member states of the UN, OSCE and EU have indeed substantially increased the financial resources for civilian missions. They have also made efforts regarding staff resources, equipment and mission support. There has been less change in the financial, personnel and procurement rules. Despite some flexibility with respect to funding, there has been little actual reform.”
The authors find surprising variation across the organizations. The EU has not done better than the UN and OSCE. It lags behind in terms of meaningful staff reform as well as mission support. It has a relatively high vacancy rate, does not provide all staff with pre-deployment training and has struggled to establish a modest Mission Support Platform. This cannot be explained by pointing out political factors, such as the composition of the membership, they stress.
The EU has a more homogeneous and wealthier membership than the UN and OSCE. Instead it is important to consider variation across the institutional factors. Due to the highly institutionalized nature of the EU, proposals for change need to be discussed by the member states in their specialized committees. This creates many veto points and obstacles even for pragmatic solutions. Getting consent is not only a formal requirement; the EU also has an institutional practice in which everything gets checked with the member states.
The importance of institutional context becomes further apparent in the UN and OSCE, the authors state. The drive to improve performance in the UN can be explained by the high demand for missions since the publication of the Brahimi report in 2000, which has been accompanied by a push for optimizing the use of the available resources.
These pressures have focused attention on mission support and have allowed for a considerable professionalization. In the OSCE, the analysis uncovered the importance of lower degrees of institutionalization, stringent budgetary procedures and the need for consensus among the diverse membership. These factors pushed the OSCE staff to suggest several pragmatic reforms as well. The large-scale Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has furthermore focused attention in the OSCE. Despite political heterogeneity, the UN and OSCE have thus managed to adopt a less-politicalized and more pragmatic approach to civilian missions.
The findings merit further research into how the institutional context constraints and facilitates learning in international organizations. Through the explicit comparative context on international organizations, it complements the institutional findings of Benner et al. (2011), who show how the UN has established dedicated learning units within the Secretariat, and Hardt (2018), who analyses the importance of informal sharing processes in NATO. This article strengthens, in this regard, the case for further research on the institutional context.
Furthermore, this article has focused on institutional change resulting from new information, experience and observation, but it has not analyzed whether learning processes eventually result in better performance. In line with the expanding literature on the performance of international organizations (Gutner and Thompson, 2010; Lall, 2017; Tallberg et al., 2016; Young, 2001), future research could focus on the role of learning when it comes to actual performance.

Dijkstra, H., Petrov, P., & Mahr, E. (2019). 'Learning to deploy civilian capabilities: How the United Nations, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and European Union have changed their crisis management institutions'. Cooperation and Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718823814