Coordination in United Nations peacebuilding: A theory-guided approach

Coordination between different United Nations (UN) departments, funds, agencies, and programmes has become an issue of increasing concern for scholars and practitioners alike. With the United Nations taking on ever more ambitious roles in countries emerging from conflict ; no single unit or agency can master the task of post-conflict reconstruction ; also known as peacebuilding ; alone; instead ; a concerted effort is called for. Recent efforts at reorganizing the way the United Nations works in peacebuilding missions have not yielded the desired results of achieving a more coherent ; and in that way more efficient and more effective UN presence. In order to offer fresh inputs for the debate ; this paper looks at the issue of coordination from a theoretical perspective. Informed by organization theory ; a framework for interorganizational coordination is developed and then applied to the United Nations and peacebuilding. The main finding is that in order to improve interorganizational coordination and in lieu of trying to become one streamlined hierarchical organization ; the United Nations should acknowledge its network character and cultivate those social and structural control mechanisms which facilitate coordination in networks.