Performance under ambiguity: International organization performance in UN peacekeeping

This article argues that ambiguity—indeterminacy between alternative interpretations of a phenomenon—is inherent in the peace operations field, and makes defining and assessing the UN’s performance problematic. Applying Gutner and Thompson’s framework for international organization performance (IOP) research to UN peacekeeping, it argues further that the relationship between process performance and outcomes in peacekeeping is irreducibly ambiguous, and that ambiguity has significant implications for efforts to measure and improve peacekeeping performance. To demonstrate this, the article reviews methods employed by the UN to measure its peacekeeping performance, arguing that the primary method employed—results-based budgeting (RBB)—is inherently unable to cope with the challenges of performance ambiguity. Its adoption and continued use despite its evident shortcomings are due to RBB’s legitimacy in the wider organizational field of international public management in which the UN Secretariat, and UN peacekeeping, perform. Finally, the article considers recent efforts to improve process performance in UN peacekeeping, and discuss the ways in which so-called ‘integration’ reforms central to such efforts are a means of reducing and managing the ambiguity inherent in peacekeeping.