WHO Says Competition Is Healthy : How Civil Society Can Change IGOs

In this paper I argue that the politicization of civil society can lead non-state actors to create new international institutions which compete with traditional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to provide global public goods; this competition over resources and authority, in turn, can put IGOs under pressure to undertake institutional change. I illustrate this argument by looking at the changing role of the World Health Organization in the field of global health. The case study shows how increased funding to support health initiatives in other UN agencies, the burgeoning of health NGOs, and the emergence of private foundations such as the Gates Foundation, put the WHO under pressure to change in order to avoid becoming irrelevant.Das Papier argumentiert, dass aufgrund der Legitimitätskrise intergouvernementaler Organisationen zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure selbst neue Institutionen gründen, um die anstehenden governance-Aufgaben anstelle der IGOs zu übernehmen. Diese neuen Institutionen können daher als Rivalen verstanden werden, die in Konkurrenz zu den traditionellen IGOs nach knappen Ressourcen wie Finanzen und Autorität streben. Diese Konkurrenz setzt IGOs zunehmend unter Druck, sich institutionell zu wandeln. Das vorliegende Papier illustriert dieses Argument anhand der Reform der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO). Die Fallstudie zeigt, wie die zunehmende Bereitstellung von Mitteln für Gesundheitsinitiativen in anderen UN Organisationen, die steigende Zahl von Gesundheits-NGOs und die Entstehung von privaten Stiftungen wie der Gates Foundation, die WHO unter Druck setzte sich zu wandeln, um in diesem neuen Handlungsumfeld ein relevanter Akteur zu bleiben

WHO says competition is healthy - how civil society can change IGOs

"Das Papier argumentiert, dass aufgrund der Legitimitätskrise intergouvernementaler Organisationen zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure selbst neue Institutionen gründen, um die anstehenden governance-Aufgaben anstelle der IGOs zu übernehmen. Diese neuen Institutionen können daher als Rivalen verstanden werden, die in Konkurrenz zu den traditionellen IGOs nach knappen Ressourcen wie Finanzen und Autorität streben. Diese Konkurrenz setzt IGOs zunehmend unter Druck, sich institutionell zu wandeln. Das vorliegende Papier illustriert dieses Argument anhand der Reform der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO). Die Fallstudie zeigt, wie die zunehmende Bereitstellung von Mitteln für Gesundheitsinitiativen in anderen UN Organisationen, die steigende Zahl von Gesundheits-NGOs und die Entstehung von privaten Stiftungen wie der Gates Foundation, die WHO unter Druck setzte sich zu wandeln, um in diesem neuen Handlungsumfeld ein relevanter Akteur zu bleiben." (Autorenreferat)"In this paper I argue that the politicization of civil society can lead non-state actors to create new international institutions which compete with traditional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to provide global public goods; this competition over resources and authority, in turn, can put IGOs under pressure to undertake institutional change. I illustrate this argument by looking at the changing role of the World Health Organization in the field of global health. The case study shows how increased funding to support health initiatives in other UN agencies, the burgeoning of health NGOs, and the emergence of private foundations such as the Gates Foundation, put the WHO under pressure to change in order to avoid becoming irrelevant." (author's abstract

The 2020 US Presidential Election and the Transatlantic Relationship Under Stress

President Trump has created turmoil in the transatlantic relationship. Biden has taken a conciliatory tone towards allies and promised to return the US to multilateral cooperation as president. But the transatlantic relationship will never return to its heyday. Three long-term trends will shape the future of US foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship: the global shift in the distribution of power, and especially what the US-China rivalry means for Europe; the US’ ambivalence towards multilateralism and why it will likely endure; and changing domestic coalitions within the US that might be a harbinger of a foreign policy revolution

Legitimacy and the cognitive sources of international institutional change: The case of regional parliamentarization

How and under what conditions does legitimacy affect processes of international institutional change? This article specifies and evaluates three causal mechanisms by which variation in legitimacy induces institutional change in international organizations (IOs) and argues that an important, yet hitherto neglected, source of legitimacy-based change is cognitive in nature. Using survival analysis, we evaluate these mechanisms with a novel dataset on the establishment of parliamentary institutions in thirty-six regional organizations between 1950 and 2010. We find that the empowerment of supranational secretariats, engagement with the European Union, and parliamentarization in an organization's neighborhood increase the likelihood of regional parliamentarization. This suggests that legitimacy judgments that draw on cognitive referents provide an important source of international institutional change. We illustrate the underlying cognitive emulation mechanism with a case study of parliamentarization in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

Trust and transparency in an age of surveillance

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust - rather than trust - can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society

Jenseits der Wahlen: sieben Trends, die die Innen- und Außenpolitik der USA prägen werden

Viele politische Entscheidungsträger in Deutschland und anderen EU-Staaten dürften darauf hoffen, dass die transatlantischen Beziehungen nach den bevorstehenden US-Präsidentschaftswahlen am 3.November wieder in ruhigere Fahrwasser gelangen, falls der Demokrat Joe Biden gewinnt. Allerdings wird der innen-und außenpolitische Handlungsspielraum des amerikanischen Präsidenten auch von langfristigen und strukturellen Entwicklungen bestimmt, die über die nächsten (und übernächsten) US-Wahlen hinauswirken. Sieben Trends sind in dieser Hinsicht besonders relevant. Zusammen betrachtet verdeutlichen sie, dass außenpolitische Anforderungen und innenpolitische Ressourcen in den USA zunehmend auseinanderklaffen. (Autorenreferat

On the relationship between trust, transparency, and surveillance

Trust and transparency have become key themes in debates on surveillance, but the relationship of these three concepts to one another is not straightforward or self-evident. This chapter critically reconsiders the conventional narrative that greater transparency can be a remedy against the dangers and risks of surveillance, that transparency can restore public trust, and that high levels of public trust are desirable for upholding democratic principles in an age of pervasive surveillance. The implications of the contributions collected in this volume are that transparency cannot be blindly relied upon to reduce the harms of surveillance or to restore trust, and under certain circumstances, distrust rather than trust is called for to bolster democratic accountability and resist domination. We do not suggest that trust and transparency need to be rejected altogether, but rather that their ambivalent and sometimes contradictory relationship requires us to better understand how they are constructed in specific social, historical, economic, and political contexts and how their effects are shaped by specific constellations of power

Historical institutionalism and international relations : towards explaining change and stability in international institutions

This chapter introduces historical institutionalism (HI) to international relations (IR). Historical institutionalism, located outside of IR’s paradigmatic debates, has been given relatively little explicit attention within IR. We argue, however, that scholarship on international institutions is increasingly concerned with issues that HI was developed to address and that this overlap of interests is a compelling reason for IR to explicitly engage with HI. We discuss what is distinctive about HI, especially in relation to rational and sociological institutionalisms. Then, as groundwork for empirical research, we develop a systematic conceptualization of the terms “institutional development,” “stability,” and “change” by distinguishing three dimensions of change: speed, scope and depth. Finally, we provide an overview of the empirical chapters in this volume and reflect on what status HI should have within the existing field of IR theories

Legitimacy and institutional change in international organisations: a cognitive approach

Why are some institutional designs perceived as more legitimate than others, and why is the same institutional design sometimes perceived as legitimacy-enhancing in one setting and not in another? In a world in which most international organisations (IOs) do not fully embody societal values and norms, such as democratic participation and equal treatment, why do legitimacy deficits in some organisations lead to pressure for institutional change while in others they are tolerated? These are important questions given that many analysts have diagnosed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ of IOs, but we argue that existing approaches are ill equipped to answer them. We show that the existing legitimacy literature has an implicit model of institutional change – the congruence model – but that this model has difficulty accounting for important patterns of change and non-change because it lacks microfoundations. We argue that attributions of legitimacy rest on perceptions and this implies the need to investigate the cognitive bases of legitimacy. We introduce a cognitive model of legitimacy and deduce a set of testable propositions to explain the conditions under which legitimacy judgments change and, in turn, produce pressures for institutional change in IOs.peerReviewe