NATO Ministries of Defense and Transparency of Job Roles of Civilian Personnel: Openness or Secrecy?

ABSTRACT

The transparency of the job roles of civilian personnel has emerged as an important aspect to consider in the framework of the transformation of the ministries or departments of defense in NATO member countries, but also in non-NATO countries. Acknowledged internationally as significant to successful and democratic policy-making, defense ministries are expected to ensure an increased openness toward the public. This article concentrates on the job roles of civilian personnel of the defense ministries and the regulation of the level of their transparency. The assumption was to see a large presence of transparency practices in the defense ministries. While the overwhelming pattern is that there is some transparency provided of job roles, in many of countries researched it is seen that the job roles of the civilian personnel of the defense ministries are not public. It is found that the transparency practices reflect different legal systems and defense characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• NATO
• ministry of defense
• civilian personnel
• transparency
• job roles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Transparency International, Progress [Un]Made – Defence Governance in Central and Eastern Europe (London: Transparency International, 2020).

2. Cindy Williams and Curtis Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies,” Defence Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 97-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702430600838586; Thomas-Durell Young, “Programming challenges and impediments to reform: identifying pragmatic solutions,” Defense & Security Analysis 34, no. 1 (2018): 73-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2018.1421404.

3. Williams and Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies”.

4. Williams and Gilroy, The Transformation of Personnel Policies, SIGMA, The Principles of Public Administration (Paris: OECD, 2017).

5. Stefan Wehmeier and Oliver Raaz, “Transparency matters: The concept of organizational transparency in the academic discourse,” Public Relations Inquiry 1, no. 3 (2012): 337-366. https://doi.org/10.1177/2046147X12448580.

6. Transparency International, What is transparency (Berlin: Transparency International, 2012).

7. OECD, Better Regulation in Europe: Luxembourg (Paris: OECD, 2010), https://doi,org/10.1787/9789264095113-en.

8. Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, “Introduction: Transparency and World Politics,” in Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, eds. Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1-12.

9. Ann M. Florini, “A new role for transparency,” Contemporary Security Policy 18, no. 2 (1997): 51-72. https://doi.org/10.1080/135232697084041611997.

10. Albert Meijer, “Understanding the complex dynamics of Transparency,” Public Administration Review 73, no. 3 (2013): 429-439. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12032.

11. Pan Suk Kim, John Halligan, Namshin Cho, Cheol H. Oh, and Angela M. Eikenberry, “Toward participatory and transparent governance: Report on the sixth global forum on reinventing government,” Public Administration Review 65, no. 6 (2005): 646-654. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2005.00494.

12. James J. Marquardt, “Leading by Example, Lighting the World: Open Government, Transparency, and Soft Power in Obama’s National Security Policy,” Democracy and Security 17, no. 4 (2021): 356-398. https://doi.org/10.1080/17419166.2021.1934671.

13. Andrew K. Schnackenberg and Edward C. Tomlinson, “Organizational transparency a new perspective on managing trust in organization-stakeholder relationships,” Journal of Management 42, no. 7 (2014): 1784-1810. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206314525202.

14. Gregory Michener and Katherine Bersch, “Identifying transparency,” Information Polity 18, no. 3 (2013): 233-242.

15. Pavel Král and Graham Cuskelly, “A model of transparency: determinants and implications of transparency for national sport organizations,” European Sport Management Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2017): 237-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/16184742.2017.1376340; Brad Rawlins, “Give the emperor a mirror: Toward developing a stakeholder measurement of organizational transparency,” Journal of Public Relations Research 21, no. 1 (2008): 71-99. https://doi.org/10.1080/10627260802153421.

16. Roger Cotterrell, “Transparency, mass media, ideology and community,” Journal for Cultural Research 3, no. 4 (1999): 414-426. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797589909367176.

17. Král and Cuskelly, “A model of transparency”.

18. Ibid.

19. Marquardt, “Leading by Example”.

20. Ibid.

21. Christopher Hood, “Transparency,” in Encyclopaedia of Democratic Thought, eds. Paul Barry Clarke and Joe Foweraker (London: Routledge, 2001), 863-868.

22. Vito Tanzi, “Corruption around the world: causes, consequences, scope and cures,” IMF Staff Papers 45, no. 4 (1998).

23. Hood, “Transparency”.

24. John Ferejohn, “Accountability and authority: towards a model of political accountability,” In Democracy, Accountability and Representation, eds. Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes and Bernard Manin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131-153.

25. Deirdre. M. Curtin, “Transparency and political participation in EU governance: a role for civil society?” Cultural Values 3, no. 4 (1999): 445-471. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797589909367178.

26. Maria-Dolores Guillamón, Francisco Bastida and Bernardino Benito, “The Determinants of Local Government’s Financial Transparency,” Local Government Studies 37, no. 4 (2011): 391-406. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2011.588704.

27. Maxat Kassen, “Understanding transparency of government from a Nordic perspective: open government and open data movement as a multidimensional collaborative phenomenon in Sweden,” Journal of Global Information Technology Management 20, no. 4 (2017): 236-275. https://doi.org/10.1080/1097198X.2017.1388696.

28. Král and Cuskelly, “A model of transparency”.

29. Thomas-Durell Young, “Questioning the ‘Sanctity’ of long-term defense planning as practiced in Central and Eastern Europe,” Defence Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 357-373. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2018.1497445.

30. Susan E. Dudley and Kai Wegrich, “The role of transparency in regulatory governance: comparing US and EU regulatory systems,” Journal of Risk Research 19, no. 9 (2015), 1141-1157. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2015.1071868.

31. Peter Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

32. Ben Magahy and Mark Payman, “Ethics and Business Conduct in Defence Establishments: An International Review,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 1 (2010): 57-76. https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570903523065; Samuel P. Huntington, The third wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

33. Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 14.

34. Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners, 106; Magahy and Payman, “Ethics and Business Conduct in Defence Establishments”.

35. Magahy and Payman, “Ethics and Business Conduct in Defence Establishments”.

36. Peter. A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political science and the three new Institutionalisms,” Political Studies XLIV (1996), 936-957.

37. Paul Pierson, “The limits of design: Explaining institutional origins and change,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions 23, no. 4 (2000), 475-499. https://doi.org/10.1111/0952-1895.00142.

38. Pierson, “The limits of design.;” Guy B. Peters, Jon Pierre, and Desmond S. King, “The politics of path dependency: Political conflict in historical institutionalism,” The Journal of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005), 1275-1300. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2005.00360.x.

39. Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, “The study of critical junctures: Theory, narrative, and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism,” World Politics 59, no. 3 (2007): 341-369. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887100020852.

40. Kathleen Thelen, “Historical institutionalism in comparative politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2, no. 1 (1999), 369-404. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.2.1.369; Erna Ruijer and Albert Meijer, “National Transparency Regimes: Rules or Principles? A Comparative Analysis of the United States and The Netherlands,” International Journal of Public Administration 39, no. 11 (2016), 895-908. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2015.1057343.

41. Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods (London: Sage, 2018).

42. Anne-Kathrin Kreft, “The gender mainstreaming gap: Security Council resolution 1325 and UN peacekeeping mandates,” International Peacekeeping 24, no. 1 (2016): 132-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2016.1195267; Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 887-917. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550789.

43. David Pion-Berlin, “Delegation or Dereliction? When Governments Assign Too Many Defense Posts to Military Officials,” Democracy and Security 16, no. 1 (2019): 81-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/17419166.2019.1582339.

44. Ibid.

45. Thomas C. Bruneau and Richard B. Goetze, Jr. “Ministries of Defense and Democratic Control,” in Who Guards the Guardians and How? Democratic Civil-Military Relations, eds. Thomas C. Bruneau and Scott D. Tollefson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 71-98.

46. Pion-Berlin, “Delegation or Dereliction?”

47. Magahy and Payman, “Ethics and Business Conduct in Defence Establishments”.

48. Alexander S. Kolbin, “‘Disarmament Market’ Effects of Information Disclosures,” The Nonproliferation Review 21, no. 2 (2014): 229-238. https://doi.org/10.1080/10736700.2014.961253.

49. Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1999).

50. Geert Hofstede, The 6-D Model of National Culture, https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-hofstede/6d-model-of-national-culture/.

51. Amadeo Watkins, “Fighter aircraft acquisition in Croatia: failure of policy delivery,” Defense & Security Analysis 35, no. 3 (2019): 261-282. https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2019.1640419.

52. Young, “Programming challenges”

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. Thomas-Durell Young, “The failure of defense planning in European Post-Communist Defense Institutions: ascertaining causation and determining solutions,” Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 7 (2018): 1031-1057. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2017.1307743.

56. Young, “Programming challenges”.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Young, “Questioning the ‘Sanctity’”.

60. Ruijer and Meijer, “National Transparency Regimes”.

61. Williams and Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies”.

62. Ann M. Florini, “Increasing Transparency in Government,” International Journal on World Peace 19, no. 3 (2002): 3-37.

63. Kassen, “Understanding transparency of government”.

64. Williams and Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies”.

65. Kassen, “Understanding transparency of government”.

66. Robert J. Lemke and James J. Marquardt, “Freedom and Transparency: Democracies, Non-Democracies, and Conventional Arms Transfers,” Democracy and Security 3, no. 3 (2007): 343-368. https://doi.org/10.1080/17419160701545031.

67. Williams and Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies”.

68. Giselle. A. Auger, “Trust me, trust me not: An experimental analysis of the effect of transparency on organizations,” Journal of Public Relations Research 26, no. 4 (2014): 325-343. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2014.908722; Julia Jahansoozi, “Organization-stakeholder relationships: Exploring trust and transparency,” Journal of Management Development 25, no. 10 (2006): 942-955. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621710610708577; Roderick L. Lee and Rhoda C. Joseph, “An examination of web disclosure and organizational transparency,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 6 (2013): 2218-2224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.05.017; Schnackenberg and Tomlinson, “Organizational transparency a new perspective.;” Král and Cuskelly, “A model of transparency.”

69. Maja Garb and Marjan Malešič, “The causes of trust and distrust in the military,” Defense & Security Analysis 32, no. 1 (2016): 64-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2015.1130316.

70. Williams and Gilroy, “The Transformation of Personnel Policies”.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.