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Abstract

The Article unfolds in four parts.

Part I discusses the changes that public-private partnerships have wrought on the landscape of international organization funding and describes, as an example, the expanding partnership activities of the United Nations. The U.N. recently established an Office for Partnerships, which grew out of a decade of extensive contact with Ted Turner’s U.N. Foundation. The U.N.’s experience illustrates the importance partners can have, not simply on specific projects but also in bringing large-scale structural change to organizations.

Part II unpacks the concept at the heart of this Article: partner capture. Drawing on principles of bureaucratic behavior and political economy familiar from the U.S. administrative law context, Part II identifies problematic aspects of the U.N.’s current partnership activities. It notes the inadequacy of current accountability structures to deal with partner capture problems, and it shows that the stakes are sufficiently high that the U.N. and other public international organizations should aggressively address partner capture.

Part III proposes an institutional solution for the U.N. It then argues that such a solution could be implemented in other organizations, to ensure that partnerships serve the interests not just of private partners but also of organizations and their members or constituents. More specifically, an independent review bureau within the U.N. Office for Partnerships—roughly on the model of the U.S.’s Office of Management and Budget and various Inspectors General—should be created. The proposed Office of Independent Review would provide both retrospective evaluation and prospective guidance, independently assessing partnership initiatives proposed or already undertaken by U.N. entities, with the goals of developing best practices, guarding against agenda distortions, and monitoring for abuse by partners and their agents.

Part IV concludes by noting that new approaches such as those suggested by this Article form an important part of an ongoing, and healthy, expansion of the sources and structures of international law. Traditional international law doctrines and theories are inadequate to describe and organize the activities of quickly expanding networks of public and private entities operating across national borders. Drawing on domestic analogues with a long history in theory and practice furnishes one promising avenue for the development of effective legal solutions to new and complex problems.

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