Sources of Climate Action in Revolving-Door Bureaucracies

• In Event: Climate Change and Global Governance

Abstract

Bureaucrats often rotate among international organizations (IOs), working for an array of institutions over the course of their careers. This “revolving door” between international bureaucracies has become especially pronounced as IOs have proliferated in recent decades. However, bureaucrats’ career paths receive little attention in existing scholarship. We contend that the career backgrounds of policymaking bureaucrats in IOs, and how those bureaucrats interact with each other, explain institutional change and mission creep. We specifically focus on international financial institutions (IFIs), many of which are retrofitting themselves to tackle issues related to climate change and decarbonization. Recent work shows that bureaucrats deployed by IFIs to climate-vulnerable locales learn about the importance of climate change for their institutions’ mandates and invest in gaining climate expertise accordingly. We build on this research, arguing that as officials work with climate-attuned bureaucrats, they accrue expertise on climate change themselves — the result of learning and socialization processes. These climate-concerned officials should carry this knowledge with them in future assignments and even to future employers. We formalize this theory and test it with new data on the career paths of IMF bureaucrats, gleaned from surveillance reports, between 2000 and 2022. We find evidence to support our contentions. Endogenous processes related to bureaucrats’ career paths can thus explain how regime complexes evolve to encompass new issue domains.

Authors

• Richard Clark, University of Notre Dame

• Noah Zucker, London School of Economics