The OECD as an international bureaucracy

International bureaucracies constitute distinct and important features of both global governance studies and public administration scholarship. This chapter discusses key questions of this field of research and empirically illustrates the development of the OECD secretariat. The chapter shows how an established international bureaucracy still is in the making. The OECD is reaching out with a view to maintaining its relevance. By admitting new members, including new issue-areas and adopting new analytical philosophies, the organization seeks to play a role in global governance. It has become a global multi-organization. Yet, expansion does not come without a price. One key challenge is to keep bits and pieces of the organization together. There is a risk of organizational overstretch and fragmentation as the secretariat is stretched to its limits. The OECD secretariat is rifted between integration and fragmentation, autonomy and dependencies, and between classic macroeconomics and ‘neo-economics’. In short, the OECD is still an organization in the making.