Baha'i administration runs on two arms that are deliberately kept apart. One is elected: Local Spiritual Assemblies, National Spiritual Assemblies and the Universal House of Justice, which govern, legislate and decide. The other is appointed, and Baha'i writing calls it the Institution of the Learned: the Counsellors, the Auxiliary Board members and their assistants, who teach, encourage, protect and advise.
The separation is the point. The appointed arm has influence and no authority; the elected arm has authority and is bound to consult. Neither can absorb the other, because appointment runs downward from the Universal House of Justice through the Counsellors while election runs upward from the believers through the delegates, and the two lines meet only at the top.
Baha'i thought presents this as its answer to a problem it identifies in earlier religious history, in which learning and government fused into a clergy that could not be corrected. The Faith has no clergy, and the appointed arm is designed to supply what a learned class supplies without the power such a class ordinarily accumulates. Whether the design holds up over the long run is a question about a religion barely two centuries old, and the atlas records the structure and its stated rationale rather than assessing it. An International Teaching Centre, established at the Baha'i World Centre in 1973, coordinates the appointed arm globally.