The curiousity that sparked this book was my first experience of a global public-private partnership. While working for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in 2003, I was asked to comment about a potential global public-private partnership (GPPP) between the Interpol Secretariat General and an American philanthropic organization. In essence, Interpol had applied for a million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund a bio-terrorism training program.
The request for comment had arrived in an indirect fashion. The foundation had contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asking for comment on the proposal. The FBI referred them on to the AFP liaison officer in Washington as a more independent source. The liaison officer, a colleague of mine, asked me for a report based on my experience with the Australian National Central Bureau of Interpol (Interpol Canberra) and counter-terrorism training. I prepared a short report pointing out the strengths and the weaknesses of the proposed programme. Ultimately, the Interpol succeeded in its application, and a training programme sponsored by the Sloan Foundation ran for several years.
Yet here was the thing â why would an international government organization (IGO) seek non-public funding for a counter-terrorism programme? This question becomes more puzzling as the Interpol application was made in the years immediately following the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States. Law enforcement in the developed world was awash with additional funding for counter-terrorism. Unfortunately in those heady days, I had no time to delve into this puzzle.
After I had left the police for an academic life, the question still niggled: why do international government organizations enter global public-private partnerships? Early research provided a range of factor in the academic literature to explain why these partnerships occurred more frequently in recent decades. The most commonly cited factors include:
- changes in leadership of an organization;
- ideological changes that reshape organizational directions;
- the migration of ideas about public management from the national to the international sphere;
- the implementation of business-like practices in international government organizations;
- financial stress caused by shrinking contributions from member-states;
- the need to access research and development from the private sphere; and
- the emergence of global issues beyond the capacity of state, market or civil society actors to resolve alone.
Yet these explanations seemed somehow inadequate when weighed against my experience.
While all these factors have the potential to influence whether or not an IGO enters a GPPP, their potential is subject to interpretation through the lenses of professional and organizational cultures. This book applies an organizational approach to explore how both professional and organizational cultures also have the potential to act as influential factors in their own right, pushing international government organizations toward partnerships or alternately retarding their development.
This range of factors provides the âwhyâ, but it is also important to understand the how â how do professional and organizational culture influence GPPP? To answer we must go there, go to the IGOs , observe the partnerships in operation and speak to those who manage them. By observing three organizations â the International Criminal Police Organization, commonly known as Interpol,1 the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)2 and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) â this book demonstrates how police professionals formulate partnerships that conform with the controlling aspects of police culture; engineers build elegantly structured partnerships; and conservatorsâ partnerships focus on whatever it takes to save the cultural artefacts of humankind.
IGOs are a significant part of the policy environment â globally and domestically. For example, the ITU provides a technical framework enabling people to have telephone conversations between any two (or more) points on the globe; Interpol facilitates police cooperation across international borders; and ICCROM3 works to ensure the preservation of cultural heritage. These are only a fraction of 250+ IGOs created over the past two centuries as formalized mechanisms of cooperation between nations.
European governmentâs created the first IGO at the Conference of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars â the Central Commission for the Navigation on the Rhine (1815). There are now IGOs involved in issues ranging from the most basic of human needs to the furthest reaches of technology â from famine relief to satellite communications. Some IGOs are tiny, with barely three member-states; whereas others are truly global, with more than 100, and often close to 200, member-states. These organizations are important parts of the machinery making the modern world tick. Although they are not the only type of transnational actor â multi-national corporations, international non-government organizations and other actors also occupy the international sphere â they are the public bodies representing a collective response by national governments to common problems and interests.
In 1999, the United Nations announced a Global Compact with business. The Global Compact radically changed the nature of the relationship between the worldâs most important IGO and the private sector. For academics, ...