舌尖上的国际公共管理:语言作为西非国家经济共同体代表性官僚制的特征

International public administration on the tip of the tongue:language as a feature of representative bureaucracy in the Economic Community of West African States

最近的学术研究表明,人们对区域和国际组织内的性别、民族或国家代表性越来越感兴趣。相比之下,语言作为表征的标准却很少被审视。我们认为这是一个重要的疏忽,原因有二:(1)语言是重要的身份标记之一;(2)国际公共管理机构的语言制度可以独特地解决成员国和公民群体的代表性问题。本文探讨了西非国家经济共同体的语言代表性,并旨在实现两个目标:首先,文章扩展了代表性官僚制理论对语言问题的适用性;其次,文章首次对西非知名区域性组织开展研究,扩大了代表性官僚制研究的范围。因此,本文为今后对其他区域和国际组织的研究开辟了途径。

Recent scholarship shows increasing interest in gender,ethnic or national representation within regional and international organizations,in contrast,language as a criterion of representation has rarely been scrutinized.We argue that this constitutes an important oversight for two reasons:(1)language is an important identity marker;and(2)language regimes in international public administrations can uniquely address representativeness relative to both member states and groups of citizens.Our article explores language representation in the Economic Community of West African States and pursues a twofold objective:first,it extends the applicability of representative bureaucracy theory to the issue of language;and,second,it broadens the scope of representative bureaucracy studies by providing the first study on a prominent West African regional organization.As such,we develop avenues for future research on other regional and international organizations.