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.

Points for practitioners

The article is of particular relevance for managers in multilingual international and regional organizations. Organizations tend to overlook the role and impact of languages on their functioning, often considering them as a technicality. Taking the example of the Economic Community of West African States, the article argues that linguistic regimes are important for the performance and the legitimacy of the organization in terms of acceptance by both citizens and its member states.

中文翻译：

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public之以鼻的国际公共行政：语言是西非国家经济共同体代表机构的特征

最近的奖学金表明对区域和国际组织中的性别，族裔或国家代表的兴趣日益浓厚。相反，很少将语言作为代表标准进行审查。我们认为这构成了重要的监督，其原因有两个：（1）语言是重要的身份标记；（2）国际公共行政管理中的语言制度可以唯一地解决相对于成员国和公民群体的代表性。本文探讨了西非国家经济共同体中的语言代表性，并追求双重目标：第一，它将代表官僚主义理论的适用性扩展到语言问题；第二，通过提供有关著名的西非地区组织的第一份研究报告，它扩大了代表机构研究的范围。因此，我们为其他区域和国际组织的未来研究开辟了途径。

从业人员要点

这篇文章对多语言国际和地区组织的管理人员特别重要。组织往往忽略语言的作用及其对功能的影响，通常将其视为技术性。以西非国家经济共同体为例，文章认为，语言制度对于该组织在公民及其成员国的接受方面的表现和合法性很重要。