Walking the Walk, Not Talking the Talk: Project Features and Policy Change in International Organizations

When and how do international organizations (IOs) adapt their policies to external critique? This article examines IO policy change in response to civil society contestation in global drug governance. In the face of strong societal opposition, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) changed its drug policies, whereas the policies of the World Health Organization (WHO) remained largely unchanged. This is surprising because UNODC has been described as having a narrow mandate, limited inter-organizational relations, and a closed organizational culture—factors that existing research has identified as obstructive to change. To explain this outcome, we introduce the concept “project IO”: an IO that is highly dependent on earmarked funding and primarily conducts operational work. Drawing on original empirical material, we demonstrate how bureaucratic entrepreneurs in UNODC used these project features to alter their organization’s policies informally. Because WHO mainly does regulatory work and has limited access to earmarked funding in international drug politics, this avenue for change was not available to WHO staff. By theorizing project features as a pathway to policy change, our study shows that earmarked contributions and a service orientation—traditionally viewed as the greatest weaknesses of IOs as policy-makers—can be a source of agency and change.