ABSTRACT
When the current international system was established over sixty years ago, the role of secretariats was seen as essentially to support intergovernmental negotiations. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the exponential growth of an international public sector has changed that role into one of management, but in a context that civil servants of the former times would have found astounding. It can be argued that international secretariats perform three functions. The three functions—regime creation, norm enforcement, and direct service provision—describe what the secretariats do. The new challenges of the international public sector will require that efforts to institute results-based management (RBM) throughout the international secretariats be successful. The changing nature of the international public sector will have implications for multilateral diplomacy. For the international secretariats, the problem will be to train international civil servants to be effective in a changing environment.
