Balancing Incentives Among Actors: A Carrots and Sticks Approach to Reputation in UN Peacekeeping Missions

With peacekeeping operations increasingly including a multitude of actors with varying interests and competing priorities, international organizations are forced to balance the needs of the actors involved in such missions.
And because international organizations often depend on member states as implementing agents, this could cause such organizations to suppress their own interests in favor of member states. That, in turn, could ultimately negatively affect the communities in which the peacekeepers operate.
This dynamic is present in United Nations peacekeeping operations, and some have sought to align the incentives of the UN and the states that contribute peacekeepers so as to harness reputation as a force to encourage the good behavior of all involved.
SABRINA M. KARIM argues that this alignment rarely happens because of international organizations’ reliance on member states. Through the dynamics of UN peacekeeping operations, she shows that the UN reliance on states to provide police officers and troops suppresses the UN’s own interests in favor of the contributing states’ interests.
In ‘Balancing Incentives Among Actors: A Carrots and Sticks Approach to Reputation in UN Peacekeeping Missions’, published in AJIL Unbound, which supplements the American Journal of International Law, KARIM also identifies a carrots and sticks approach to balancing incentives.
Drawing on a rational choice, actor-based theory to identify the mixed motives of the various actors who staff and operate peacekeeping missions, the framework proposed here provides a way to better understand the sources of the tension that exist when evaluating reputation as a disciplinary tool for international organizations.
“Indeed, a careful balancing of carrots and sticks could help balance the interests of both the UN and contributing states,” KARIM states.
What would this entail? On one hand, this means applying the stick – the public naming and shaming of states whose personnel have engaged in misconduct, regardless of the consequences, the author states. “This stick turns into multiple sticks as the UN enables third parties to penalize poorly performing states by publicizing their conduct.”
However, the stick must be coupled with a carrot – an increase in resources to those states that perform well, she adds. “In this way, the carrot incentivizes poorly performing states to reform their behavior instead of withdrawing their peacekeeping mission contributions.”
The logic is not unique to peacekeeping missions but applies to any activity undertaken by international organizations that involves the delegation of duties to other actors, according to KARIM. “Leveraging reputation as a part of a carrots and sticks balancing act is a novel way for any international organization to manage problems associated with misaligned incentives.”