Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has put particular pressure on international organizations (IOs) with member states relying on domestic strategies to address the crisis, a populist Trump government threatening withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), and countries denying adequate access and data on the extent of the pandemic within their borders. At the same time, IOs were crucial to coordinate responses and provide much-needed resources to troubled member states (Lipscy 2020). However, not all IOs performed equally well during the crisis: while some IOs essentially shut down their operations, others thrived during the crisis and managed to expand their policy instruments and tasks beyond their initial mandates (Debre and Dijkstra 2021).

Interestingly, many smaller regional IOs, defined as organizations with regional or other (that is, religious) community-based membership criteria, were among the top performers during the early days of COVID-19 despite lacking formal mandates in the areas of health. Several regional IOs without an official mandate or adequate resources changed their roles during the crisis to take on new tasks or exhibit leadership responsibilities. In this regard, many regional IOs went from emulative maintainers to innovative and even transformative leaders. Regional IOs such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) or the Council of Europe (CoE) started providing necessary funds to member states to increase their liquidity, negotiated with global IOs to ensure medical and food supply chains, and regulated necessary trans-border movements (Debre and Dijkstra 2021). This is surprising, given that many of these smaller regional IOs have rather been on the passive side with regard to their performance and activities in recent years and are not necessarily endowed with large budgets and resources. We therefore ask which roles regional IOs opt for and take on when facing global crises and how the observed changes can be explained.

We argue that the specific role change towards innovative and transformative leaders occurs because regional IOs are constituted by a normative self-understanding as community organizations. These normative priors can become activated during crises and allow regional IOs to become engaged in providing and helping the members of their community.