In her book review of Birgit Müller's (ed.) "The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organisations", Ingeborg Gaarde writes: "This book takes us to the negotiation rooms and backstages at UN Headquarters as well as to the local sites where global policies show their direct impact [...] The authors show how international organizations are working in disciplined arenas with layers of embedded power dynamics, and in the confrontation between representations. However, the chapters of the book demonstrate that the contentions and rationale behind policy-making in these institutions is often concealed from the world audience in the effort to reach specific finalities [...]."
November 18, 2013 | Ingeborg Gaarde*
Book review: The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organisations
Birgit Müller** (Ed.): The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organisations (Anthropology, Culture and Society). Pluto Press. (October 15, 2103).
In this collection, Birgit Müller and the co-authors of The Gloss of Harmony take us on a journey of insider exposure to how policy making is produced in a number of United Nation (UN) agencies. The authors, all from different traditions of anthropology, apply innovative solid ethnographic research methods to unveil how these institutions influence how ‘our world is governed’ through policy making in international negotiation rooms and beyond.
The authors reveal how the UN agencies operate on different scales and seek to harmonize and obscure conflicts rather than make them apparent. The insiders’ in-depth perspectives are presented in a captivating manner throughout the book and shed valuably light on the opaque processes that often take place behind the numerous ‘agreed texts’ and ‘consensus-making statements of the United Nations’.
This collection is not only an important tool for scrutinizing policy-making of international institutions, it provides also an inspiration to further analyze how today’s institutions reflect the emerging mistrust in institutional integrity and claims for more real democracy and social change.
Diluting Conflict
The editor of the book is setting the stage for a critical analysis of international organizations as battlefields for policy making from the global to the local level.
The book collection uncovers some of the current challenges of the UN system, which is facing both internal and external constraints to fulfill the noble UN mission of improving the world. The collection sheds light on some of the paradoxes and challenges of underfunded UN institutions struggling to maintain their moral mandate, relevance, and credibility.
In the introductory chapter of the book, Müller addresses the double standards of the member states of the UN that contribute to the vicious circle many UN agencies are facing today; on the one hand member states are demanding an efficient and visible UN on the international arena, on the other hand they are cutting the vein to its financial autonomy:
“Paradoxically, while over the last twenty years states have called on the UN and its specialized agencies to address an ever wider range of problems, they refused to increase the funds dedicated to the organization” (p. 2).
The authors help the reader to understand the logics of international organizations and its incentives to neutralize political conflicts - often by rendering contentious issues ‘technical’. As the editor puts it: “Openly antagonistic debates between states hardly exits in the muted diplomatic atmosphere of the UN” (p. 12).
Müller argues that this endeavor to absorb critique and to replace politics in the realm of the UN by technical expertise is limiting the aspiration for democratic policy-making.
This book takes us to the negotiation rooms and backstages at UN Headquarters as well as to the local sites where global policies show their direct impact: Bendix and Fresia follow painstakingly slow decision making procedures in the World Intellectual Property Organization and in the UNHCR in Geneve. Kelly and Cowan address the paradoxes and tensions of the international monitoring of human rights. Hauser-Schäublin follows controversies on cultural objects at UNESCO and beyond.
The authors show how international organizations are working in disciplined arenas with layers of embedded power dynamics, and in the confrontation between representations. However, the chapters of the book demonstrate that the contentions and rationale behind policy-making in these institutions is often concealed from the world audience in the effort to reach specific finalities “that arrange a plurality of specific aims as a part of the evolving ‘art of government’” (p. 89), as Bille Larson puts it with reference to Foucault (1991 [1978]).
Bille Larson argues in his contribution to the book that guidelines as ‘politics of technicality’ may be part of an effort to disguise political battles in the field of governance. His chapter reveals the ‘play’ and ‘meta communication’ behind so-called ‘neutral guidance’: “The depoliticized language of guidance does not rule out politics, it merely displaces it to different arenas and forms of action”. (p.89).
Getting Multilateral Organizations Right
One of the book’s key messages is to openly voice the divergence between the normative high moral mandates of the UN and its outcomes, which have been built upon the lowest common denominator often ‘watered down’ to an extent where it becomes emptied of meaningful policy guidance.
Moreover, some of the chapters expose the (unintended) consequences of uncritically relying on UN policies or technical guidance outside the negotiation rooms. As the editor of the book phrases it: “It is on the level of local practice that the gloss evaporates” (p.18). This is well demonstrated in Müller’s critical examination of FAO ‘Guidance for Food Security in Nicaragua’ (p. 202) as well as in Iain McDonald’s chapter on ‘Transnational Institutional Space for Environmental Governance’ (p.227).
In the effort to increase insights in the practices and effects of international governance, the book could have advantageously left room for the scrutiny of new hybrid global governance arrangements, such as public private partnerships.
In the last section of the collection, devoted to ‘participation and actor building across scales’ Bellier shows us how Indigenous Peoples built space for them-selves at the UN. She demonstrates how peoples’ movements challenge global governance both from ‘outside’ and from ‘below’ in constant tension of being absorbed by the institution. As Müller points out, social movements affirming themselves as ‘political contrarians’ may “carry conflicted realities back into the muted diplomatic arena.” (p.17). She mentions thus briefly, at the end of her last chapter of the collection, the recent reform (2009) of the FAO Committee on Food Security, which has paved the way for critical contestation inside the UN system (p. 225).
In this reformed UN Committee, people’s organizations participate in policy-making processes via a well established autonomous civil society mechanism. The success of caving out a space for social movement on this international policy level has catalyzed a renewed debate on the configuration of global governance of land and land tenure. Maybe the example of people's participation in global decision-making processes in the Committee on World Food Security, can be a catalyst to change how governance is shaping other UN arenas or even other global governance settings.
Reading the book, one is inspired to go further and draw comparative lines to the waves of social movements rising in various corners of the world over the last couple of years. These new social movement ‘challengers’ are not just claiming the streets in their respective countries, but are also demanding international institutions to fill the global governance vacuum with more democracy.
In different corners of the world, alliances of people are claiming transparency and a deepening of democracy by turning the governance system upside down towards governance from the bottom up; people’s movements claim to be in the driver’s seat of global solutions affecting their daily lives and life conditions. Empowered citizens wish to promote global cooperation between people, to endorse a democratic and responsive global governance system, and to distribute and enforce rights and obligations for all members of our global society. Thus today, global activism is contesting the foundations of governance from the local to the global level to an unprecedented degree and brings in the contestation called for by Müller and her co-authors.
Revitalize democratic policy making
The French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, investigates in his famous work Disagreement (1998) different regimes of “truth” and their effects on practical politics. He calls attention to the ‘ramifications of consensus’, and argues that politics can never be ‘pure’. Lack of disagreement contributes to what the French philosopher famously called “the end of politics”. (Rancière, 2004 [1998]). The Gloss of Harmony has written itself into this discussion.
With this collection, the authors provide us with a foundation for new scholarship on policy-making processes and prepare the ground for conducting further research inside the UN apparatus. It reminds us that policy and technical guidance can have unintended effects and consequences for the people on the ground and it alerts us to the problem that policy and technical guidance at the local level can become alien to the mandate of the UN.
Moreover, this book opens another important avenue for further research; namely the increasing challenges of bringing new individual and collective actors into the realm of the UN. In this regard, special attention should be paid to one of the conclusions made by Müller, precisely capturing one of major challenges of our time:
“Paradoxically, while civil society organizations are required to conform to the style and the language of the institutions, it is their potential for naming and contesting concrete realities that makes them indispensable because it enlivens the institutions.” (p. 18).
The challenge of recognizing contestation as a driver for social change in the political life goes way beyond the realm of policy making of the United Nations.
With this collection, Müller and her co-authors contribute to the debate on how to rethink the infrastructure of global governance to provide space for antagonistic debates between all concerned actors: a core component to give legitimacy to any policy making process.
This book cannot be missed by any scholar or citizen trying to get a grasp on how today’s world is – or should be – governed.
References:Foucault, Michel (1991 [1978]) ‘Governmentalilty’ in Grahma Birchell, Colin Gordin and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rancière, Jacques (1998). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press
* This book review article is written by Ingeborg Gaarde is PhD Candidate, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.
** Editor of ”The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy Making in Multilateral Organisations” Birgit Müller is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is the author of many books including Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism (2008).
