Browsing by Subject "Bureaucracy"

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    Constructing knowledge and policies on avian influenza: how do international organizations craft global models?
    (2013-05) Chien, Yu-Ju
    My dissertation examines how three specialized international agencies - the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) - produced and shaped global authoritative knowledge and policies on avian influenza. Collaboration among international agencies is unprecedented in global governance. My dissertation examines this novel collaboration, specifically, how the three agencies managed to overcome disconnect and competition, and eventually agreed on a One Health policy framework. Besides explaining this policy transition, I reveal how the WHO, FAO and OIE negotiated, constructed, and prioritized their solutions; how they reshaped boundaries between research communities to curate avian flu science; and why gaps between their ideal framework and practices persist. By illustrating the crucial and influential role of international agencies in science and policymaking, my research contributes to theories on international policy and norm formation. I demonstrate that international agencies are actively involved in global knowledge, policy and norm-making. In this case, they not only manufactured consensus on One Health, but they also influenced the interests and interactions of other global actors such as experts, transnational agribusiness, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and nation states. My work proves that international agencies have autonomy and power independent of nation states, which is often neglected in conventional theories on international relations and policy formation. In addition, my research challenges the conventional unidirectional assumption of the relations between science and policy. My findings reveal that avian flu science has co-evolved with policies, and that the WHO, FAO and OIE actively mediated the production of avian flu science and One Health knowledge by networking with selected experts. Furthermore, I reveal that international agencies are actors with bounded rationality. Although they demonstrated great capacity to affect other actors' interests, they are still constrained by their own bureaucratic attributes, the influence of other stakeholders, and political economic realities in the policy arena. Essentially, my dissertation reveals both the power and limitations of international agencies. It contributes to understanding how power is exercised in global governance, and how knowledge, power, and social order are intertwined.
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    Implementing Intersectionality: Creating Women’s Interests in the Rulemaking Process
    (2016-07) English, Ashley
    Although political scientists have traditionally examined women’s representation by asking whether and how female legislators support or oppose particular policies related to women’s traditional areas of interest, I provide a new, broader understanding of how American women are represented at the rulemaking stage of the policymaking process. Building on the assumption that it is virtually impossible for any one representative to speak on behalf of the diverse group of women who all have their own unique perspectives and experiences as a result of their multiple, intersecting identities, I instead examine how women’s interests are constructed from the ground up as women and their advocates interact during the rulemaking process. More specifically, I ask: (1) how and when do women and their advocates refer to women in their comments?; (2) how do those references to women vary depending on the levels of attention a rule receives and the type of policy it implements?; and (3) how do women’s organizations’ references to women and their interests differ from the references to women that other rulemaking participants use? To answer these questions, I use automated text analysis and qualitative coding to analyze three unique datasets of 8,698 comments that women and their advocates submitted to rulemakers. These comments include all of the comments that women’s organizations submitted between 2007 and 2013; and the comments that women’s organizations, individual women, other organizations, and form letter campaigns submitted during rulemakings on the contraception mandate a proposal collect data on the gender wage gap among federal contractors. In general, women and their advocates most often used their comments to speak on behalf of all women, obscuring the differences between them and leaving out the concerns of intersectionally marginalized women, including women of color, poor women, and LGBTQ women. Rulemakings that receive higher levels of attention and moral controversy exacerbated this tendency. Conversely, low attention rulemakings provided women and their advocates with a unique opportunity to focus on the concerns of particular subsets of women because they received less scrutiny from the public, Congress, and the courts. Finally, women’s organizations served as compensatory representatives for women during the rulemaking process because they made more references to women and subgroups of women than the other interested citizens and organizations that submitted comments.