...inappropriate. The UN fits the defining criteria of an organized anarchy, to which the garbage can model can be expected to apply: unclear preferences, opaque organizational processes, and fluid participation. Drawing on John Kingdon's adaptation of the garbage can model, I explain changes in peacekeeping as the result of policy entrepreneurs' linking of a solution (peacekeeping) to a problem (intrastate conflicts) in the context of a policy window created by the ending of the Cold War. KEYWORDS: garbage can model, peacekeeping, agenda setting, United Nations, international organizations.

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The period since the end of the Cold War has been a turbulent one for United Nations peacekeeping. As the Cold War came to an end, the UN Security Council rapidly and dramatically transformed the practice of UN peacekeeping. Between 1988 and 1995, the Security Council authorized twenty-seven missions, compared to thirteen in the preceding forty years. (1) From fewer than 10,000 troops deployed in five missions in 1988, the number of personnel deployed in the field in peacekeeping missions peaked in 1994 at 77,783, with an annual cost of $3.6 billion as compared to $230 million six years earlier. (2) Missions were deployed to settings that were considered unsuitable for peacekeeping under the traditional principles of peacekeeping formulated during the Cold War. Accompanying these quantitative changes was a qualitative shift in the nature of peacekeeping: the development of complex or "second-generation" peacekeeping missions in which peacekeepers were sent to intrastate conflicts and the traditional peacekeeping principles of consent, neutrality, and limited use of force were stretched. (3) These missions involved significant nation-building activities in addition to the traditional truce observation role of peacekeepers. This article argues that the development of second-generation peacekeeping has been inadequately explained to date, and proposes an explanation in terms of a modified "garbage can model."

Existing research on second-generation peacekeeping has focused on questions of effectiveness, to the neglect of explaining its origins. Yet the dramatic changes in peacekeeping practice that coincided with the end of the Cold War remain puzzling, and unsatisfactorily explained. And understanding how and why peacekeeping was transformed, with mixed results, in the past is important to shaping its future. While existing studies routinely note a number of relevant factors, they do not identify causal mechanisms through which these factors produced second-generation peacekeeping, or trace how peacekeeping came to be placed on the Security Council's agenda as a solution for problems previously considered not amenable to peacekeeping. (4)

This is essentially a question about agenda setting, but has not been analyzed in terms of agenda-setting models. A large literature in organization theory addresses agenda-setting processes, and has been applied extensively to domestic decisionmaking, but only rarely to multilateral settings. (5) The UN is particularly amenable to models focusing on agenda setting and decisionmaking in "organized anarchies," or settings characterized by uncertain preferences, unclear organizational processes, and fluid participation in decisionmaking--features typified by the UN. These so-called garbage can models (GCMs) explain organizational decisionmaking under conditions of ambiguity as the result of the partially random coupling of independent streams of problems, policies, and politics. (6) Problems are joined to policies, in such settings, as a result of their coming to the fore at the same time, rather than due to a rational calculation that the solution was an optimal response to a preexisting problem. This article proposes an analysis of peacekeeping-related agenda setting in the Security Council in the period 1988-1995 in terms of a modified GCM, hypothesizing that conditions at the end of the Cold War produced a "policy window" that allowed peacekeeping to be coupled to the problem of intrastate conflict.

The Puzzle

Existing accounts of the development of second-generation peacekeeping typically recite a list of factors that were permissive of or favorable to the deployment of missions into conditions not meeting the criteria for traditional peacekeeping. These include: the end of the Cold War; foreign policy shifts by both the Soviet Union and the United States; increased cooperation among the permanent members of the Security Council (P-5); the effectiveness of Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar; the "ripeness" for settlement of superpower proxy wars; the increased willingness of Western states to assert a right to intervene in the domestic affairs of developing countries; the rise in prominence on the international agenda of intrastate conflicts; success in early multifunctional missions in the waning years of the Cold War; and a "sense," or "mood," or "atmosphere" of optimism and enthusiasm for UN peacekeeping. (7) As Peter Viggo Jaksobsen has noted, "Existing explanations generally have three things in common: they are only a couple of paragraphs long, they emphasize the end of the Cold War and they fail to specify the causal mechanisms linking the end of the Cold War to the transformation of peace operations." (8)

Such typical explanations of the emergence of second-generation peacekeeping are exemplified by the following passage in the UN's official review of peacekeeping, The Blue Helmets:

The easing of the East-West confrontation enhanced cooperation in the Security Council and provided excellent opportunities to resolve longstanding conflicts. But the end of the Cold War also saw other conflicts erupt, giving rise to fierce claims of subnational identity based on ethnicity, religion, culture and language, which often resulted in armed conflict. Responding to the new political landscape, the international community turned to peace-keeping, which grew rapidly in size and scope. (9)

But conventional accounts such as this one do not explain why the UN turned to peacekeeping, or elucidate the politics or decisionmaking process underlying the transformation of peacekeeping they describe. While the factors included in these rote listings were indeed permissive conditions, they do not explain the shift from traditional to second-generation peacekeeping. Until not long before, peacekeeping had been considered an inappropriate solution to such conflicts. And alternative responses--ranging from doing nothing to full-scale military intervention--were possible. Thus, it is not enough to note the favorable conditions at the end of the Cold War as if they were sufficient explanation of the contemporaneous transformation of peacekeeping. This transformation requires further explanation. (10)

Garbage Cans and Policy Streams

The garbage can model of organizational choice, originally proposed by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, and prominently adapted by John Kingdon in his "policy streams" model, has been highly influential in the study of organizational behavior and public policy. (11) Cohen, March, and Olsen proposed the GCM to explain decisionmaking in what they termed "organized anarchies," which are defined by three characteristics: problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation. "Problematic preferences" refers to ambiguity regarding problems and goals. Organizational actors may be uncertain as to both the nature of problems they face and what they hope to accomplish; inverting rationalist models of decisionmaking, they may discover their preferences through acting, rather than acting to achieve their preferences.

In organizations with unclear technology, organizational members are uncertain of the rules, structures, and processes by which decisions are made. The term technology refers here, following standard usage in organization theory, not to technological artifacts but rather to organizational processes and methods. Thus, in organized anarchies, organizational members do not fully understand the workings of their organization. Finally,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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