Pattern 1: The Tendency to Blame International Intergovernmental Organizations

During the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis, one prominent pattern was the tendency to blame the World Health Organization, the UN system's leading IGO for health policy. The US Secretary of Health and Human Services declared that the WHO had failed to “obtain the information that the world needed.”Footnote ¹⁸ US president Donald Trump announced a drastic decision to cut off WHO funding, on the grounds that the organization's Ethiopian Director-General had accepted Chinese defiance of WHO reporting obligations, hesitated to declare a global emergency, and capitulated to Chinese pressure to sideline Taiwanese warnings.Footnote ¹⁹ The US government was unusual in its harshness, but it was not alone in blaming the WHO.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, more than 100 countries endorsed the European Union's call for an independent investigation into the organization's handling of the disease.Footnote ²¹

Like other IGOs, the World Health Organization is a body that has been established by agreement among governments or their representatives, and is sufficiently institutionalized to include some sort of centralized administrative apparatus with a permanent staff.Footnote ²² In other words, IGOs are composed of member-states and also bureaucracies. Key features of bureaucracies include formal rules, a division of labor, and a hierarchical structure.Footnote ²³ These features have laudable aims, such as making the staff's responses consistent and impartial, facilitating efficient accumulation and use of expertise, and ensuring a chain of command.Footnote ²⁴

Yet formal rules, a division of labor, and a hierarchical structure—even if functioning flawlessly—also make bureaucracies seem impersonal, narrow, and regimented.Footnote ²⁵ Bureaucracy carries negative connotations of “faceless bureaucrats” who are mired in “red tape” and are aloof from those they serve.Footnote ²⁶ Such perceptions are particularly relevant at the international level: the majority of IGOs are headquartered in just a handful of mostly Western and wealthy countries such as Switzerland, and their performance is hard for most of the world's population to really scrutinize and understand.Footnote ²⁷

In addition to carrying negative connotations, the bureaucracies within IGOs are easy to scapegoat because they face the near-impossible task of satisfying heterogeneous stakeholders.Footnote ²⁸ Staff are expected to serve the interests of their member-states as well as the interests of the wider global public, but the two are not identical. Instead, the interests of national governments regularly conflict with each other and with the greater good.Footnote ²⁹ Consequently, no matter what IGO staff do, they are likely to irritate some subset of stakeholders and be accused of performing poorly.Footnote ³⁰

Such irritation with bureaucracy links to a conundrum highlighted in research on institutional design. When an institution is created, one key choice is setting the amount of insulation.Footnote ³¹ Insulation refers to a dampening of the mechanisms by which stakeholders can try to monitor, steer, or reverse organizational activities; in IGOs, for example, insulation may mean that member-states lack common levers of control such as financial domination or veto power.Footnote ³² Ideally, insulation would be set “just right”: enough that IGO bureaucracies are protected from the parochialism and vacillations of their member-states, but low enough that they are still accountable to those member-states. Unfortunately, insulation is difficult to calibrate, and even if perfect initially, it can change over time.Footnote ³³ Moreover, both relatively high insulation and relatively low insulation attract blame.

Consider IGOs with relatively high insulation. If member-states cannot easily monitor, steer, or reverse what bureaucracies do, it is tough for bureaucracies to claim to be accountable. Without accountability, IGO staff can fall into pathologies such as fixating on means instead of ends, promoting one-size-fits-all policy responses, or squandering resources in battles over turf.Footnote ³⁴ Relatedly, they could disregard their duty to national governments and instead pursue their own preferences, either by doing less than asked (shirking) or more than asked (zealotry).Footnote ³⁵ Since relatively high insulation makes it difficult for member-states to claw back control, disgruntled governments are likely to look for ways to substitute for that IGO.

But IGOs with relatively low insulation also attract blame, though for different reasons. If member-states readily interfere with bureaucratic activities, bureaucracies cannot carve out the space needed to achieve their laudable performance aims. Instead, they can be prevented from pursuing the public good.Footnote ³⁶ They also can be compelled to privilege a handful of member-states over others.Footnote ³⁷ The situation becomes especially hazardous if IGO staff are caught between powerful member-states who have taken different stances on an issue: relatively low insulation makes it easy for these competing member-states to exploit existing control mechanisms in their tug-of-war to pressure or punish the IGO.

Therefore intergovernmental organizations make easy targets, since they are bureaucratic entities that seem distant from those they serve, and they can almost always be denounced for too little or too much insulation from their most powerful member-states. This helps to explain the WHO's struggles in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization found itself caught between two powerful and competing member-states—it was able to raise the alarm, but it could not single-handedly answer the call.Footnote ³⁸ When the United States government suspected that the WHO bureaucracy was being manipulated by China, President Trump took advantage of an important control mechanism by moving to cut the organization's single largest source of funding.Footnote ³⁹ Such a drastic move underscores what research on bureaucracy and institutional design teaches: it is very important but incredibly difficult to ensure that IGO bureaucracies are accountable to member-states and also insulated from them.Footnote ⁴⁰

Pattern 2: The Temptation to Prioritize Narrow or Short-Term Interests

IGO-blaming is tied to a second pattern: states’ temptation to put narrow or short-term interests ahead of broader or longer-term ones. In past crises, the United States often endured special costs to lead and sustain multilateralism.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet this time, with its swift move to defund the WHO in the middle of the pandemic, the US not only refused to lead but also resisted burden-sharing. By unilaterally punishing the organization for what it perceived to be poor performance, the US jeopardized the WHO's ability to act in the future and for the broader community. Moreover, as a high-level WHO employee lamented, the American government's signal that “multilateralism isn't the answer” could ripple “across other countries and other areas of multilateralism.”Footnote ⁴² And indeed, selfish or myopic interests won out around the world as various governments implemented export restrictions, travel bans, and unilateral vaccine development—all despite the World Health Organization's objections.Footnote ⁴³

Such concern about states prioritizing short-term or narrow interests is a central topic in international relations research. A particular action may be rational from the perspective of the present, or of an individual state, yet tragically irrational from the perspective of the future, or of a collective of states.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is famously illustrated in a simple one-shot Prisoners’ Dilemma game, where the risk of a “sucker's payoff” means that each state has an immediate incentive to reject cooperation with others, even though cooperation could make all states better off.Footnote ⁴⁵ The risk can be attenuated by changing the one-shot game into a repeated interaction with no definite end. But, since governments still may struggle to commit to collective goals and endure immediate pain in order to achieve future gains,Footnote ⁴⁶ IR scholars have examined further solutions for overcoming the allure of the self and the present.

One solution is delegation, in which a “principal” (a set of nation-states) makes a revocable grant of authority to an “agent” (IGO staff), empowering the agent to act on the principal's behalf.Footnote ⁴⁷ When delegation works well, it ties states’ hands, helping them stay the course toward accomplishments that require sustained efforts now to produce big benefits later. It gets states to contribute to collective goods that otherwise would be under-provided due to free-riding. Since interactions are repeated, agents can hone their abilities to perform delegated tasks, and principals can adopt a more sanguine win some/lose some mentality toward one another. Thus, by entrusting tasks to IGO-agents, state-principals can achieve greater things than their narrow or short-term interests would normally permit.Footnote ⁴⁸

An alternative way to overcome the allure of the self and the present is through socialization, a process by which social interactions induct newcomers into particular modes of thinking, feeling, and acting.Footnote ⁴⁹ Through recurring interactions, a state develops or changes how it understands its role, responsibilities, and interests.Footnote ⁵⁰ As certain types of behavior are removed from its choice set and other types of behavior become automatic, the state becomes more predictable, trustworthy, and collaborative within its group.Footnote ⁵¹ This shifts the state away from thinking only about narrow or short-term interests, and it also makes the state's promises more credible. In international relations scholarship, two of the most important arenas for socialization are individual IGOsFootnote ⁵² and the broader post-World War II “liberal world order.”Footnote ⁵³ For the latter, the United States drew on its hegemonic position and its identity as a liberal democracy to construct a system of norms, institutions, and laws by which the US bound itself to other states in the hopes of prolonging its own leadership.

Although delegation and socialization can help governments commit to collective goals and endure immediate pain in order to achieve future gain, neither is failsafe. The success of delegation often hinges on IGO-agents having sufficient insulation from their state-principals; without such buffers, states will simply impede or reverse what their agents do. Meanwhile, the success of socialization often hinges on widespread and continuous grooming of a group identity; without such grooming, states will simply revert to their narrow or short-term interests. If delegation or socialization unravel, the underlying Prisoners’ Dilemma (which once had been transformed into a repeated game) eventually degenerates to its one-shot essence. Even if the game has not officially concluded, players begin to sense its eventual end. In a self-fulfilling prophesy, counting on broad or long-term benefits becomes questionable, which makes cooperation chancier and reinstates the pull of narrow or short-term interests.Footnote ⁵⁴

During the COVID-19 pandemic, socialization quickly proved inadequate. In the past several years, a series of challenges—including populist unrest, financial crises, refugee flows, Brexit, the securitization of public health, and a newly assertive China—have rocked regional integration and the Western-led liberal world order, chipping away at group identities and norms.Footnote ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the United States has exhibited “hegemonic fatigue.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Consequently, while public health experts certainly displayed some cross-country networks and similar ways of thinking about the crisis, socialization was not as deep among heads of government. Rather than considering themselves partners on an interconnected planet, several key government leaders focused only on the immediate needs of their own countries. This may be unfortunate, but it is not new: nationalist and protectionist leanings predate the COVID-19 outbreak.Footnote ⁵⁷

Delegation also fell apart. If the World Health Organization could coordinate the response to the virus, all countries would benefit from this collective good. However, the WHO has never been given full authority to dictate the activities of all other actors in global health governance.Footnote ⁵⁸ In fact, as WHO staff attempted to guide the world's response, state-principals themselves were among the most severe impediments, and little stopped them from rescinding or undermining the authority they already had delegated.Footnote ⁵⁹ Skittish about broadcasting vulnerabilities, some national governments were slow to report crucial information to the World Health Organization. Curious whether they could capitalize from keeping their economies running while others shut theirs down, some countries were reluctant to enter lockdowns advocated by public health experts. With chagrin, the WHO Director-General noted that numerous governments had been unresponsive, even though the World Health Organization had “rung the alarm bell loud and clear.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Behind it all, there was friction between health policy's hoped-for and wider long-term gains versus economic policy's guaranteed and concentrated short-term pains. As noted by the virologist guiding Germany's COVID-19 response:

With the “prevention paradox,” not only policy failures but also successes prompt people to question whether broad, long-term benefits were truly worth their costs. The paradox operates at the domestic level and also internationally: when the WHO acts cautiously it is criticized for failing to stop preventable deaths, but when it acts aggressively it is accused of overreacting.Footnote ⁶²

Pattern 3: The Divided Reaction to Experts

The prevention paradox relates to a third pattern from the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis: a divided reaction to experts. Schisms existed at the subnational, national, and international levels as some people readily deferred to public health officials but other people challenged them, questioning the efficacy and even the legality of their policy recommendations.Footnote ⁶³ Skepticism toward experts certainly hit the World Health Organization; ironically, some of it was fueled by people in the public health profession itself. In July 2020, for instance, 239 scientists from thirty-two countries published an open letter contradicting WHO assertions about airborne virus transmission.Footnote ⁶⁴ Highly visible to laypeople, quarrels like this made the underlying science seem open to interpretation,Footnote ⁶⁵ and some observers questioned whether the WHO was politically neutral enough to interpret the science appropriately.Footnote ⁶⁶

International relations scholarship helps to explain the divided reaction to experts, who appear most explicitly in work on “epistemic communities.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Epistemic communities are networks of professionals who have an authoritative claim over expertise and policy-relevant knowledge within a particular domain. These professionals do not always come from a single discipline, but they nevertheless share some values, causal beliefs, applied competencies, and ways of validating knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁸ One element of epistemic communities are experts within intergovernmental organizations, which are examined in earlier IR scholarship concerning functionalism and neofunctionalism. Functionalism advocated the creation of numerous IGOs, arranged along functional lines.Footnote ⁶⁹ Neofunctionalism predicted that as states and their citizens became more accustomed to entrusting tasks to unelected IGO experts, cooperation would spill into additional geographic areas and more challenging policy issues.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, from the 1940s onward, functionalist and neofunctionalist principles appeared to triumph as integration widened and deepened in Europe and the UN system encompassed the World Health Organization and other specialized agencies.

Real-world developments and IR scholarship reflected optimism that by moving authority from power-hungry nation-states to professionalized supranational experts in IGOs and elsewhere, policymaking could be more stable, efficient, and neutral.Footnote ⁷¹ In short, it could be less political. Initially, much work on epistemic communities and their functionality emphasized such upsides.

Over time, however, IR scholarship also explored downsides: perhaps policymaking could never be fully apolitical, or even if it could, that might entail a problematic “democratic deficit.”Footnote ⁷² Surely individual experts (and sometimes entire professions) have political leanings, so how could their advice ever be completely free of politics?Footnote ⁷³ If experts in a given area confidently express a consensus view, could that be due to partisanship or groupthink, rather than the discovery of an objective truth?Footnote ⁷⁴ If a more diverse group of experts is consulted, how can citizens and elected officials handle the resulting contradictions or uncertainty?Footnote ⁷⁵ And even if unelected specialists are always unbiased and correct, why should IGO staff or wider epistemic communities be able to make recommendations and choices that affect so many people when those people had little say in placing them in their positions?Footnote ⁷⁶

Suspicions about epistemic communities, functional specialization, and technocratic policymaking reflect larger anti-elite or populist sentiments. Such sentiments simmer within countries, and sometimes (as in the 1930s, 1970s, or recent years) they boil in multiple countries at once. There is more research to be done to understand current anti-elitism, but scholarship already reveals various forms it takes, such as championing folk wisdom rather than formal training, protectionism rather than economic liberalization, outlying areas rather than cosmopolitan cores, unilateralism rather than multilateralism, or nationalism rather than globalism.Footnote ⁷⁷ In addition, anti-elitism sometimes occurs alongside political polarization, which further affects how receptive particular government officials or segments of the public will be to information from experts.Footnote ⁷⁸

During the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis, all of this made things very tough for experts subnationally, nationally, and internationally. As a high-level employee in the WHO Secretariat points out, people expect the role of public health experts to be threefold:

1. 1. Use some form of rigorous analysis to synthesize the evidence.

2. 2. Test hypotheses and be poised to modify recommendations accordingly.

3. 3. Advise on the implications—direct and indirect, immediate and eventual—of various policy options.Footnote ⁷⁹

The first two are thorny. Rigor and synthesis are difficult when a crisis makes the evidence especially rushed, uneven, and incongruent.Footnote ⁸⁰ Meanwhile, modifying hypotheses and recommendations is solid scientific practice—but when done repeatedly it sows confusion and disrupts policies,Footnote ⁸¹ and when done cautiously it risks missing windows of opportunity.Footnote ⁸²

However, it is the third expectation that is most daunting. By definition, public health experts know about public health, but they do not necessarily know about economics, education, or other societal elements that are also part of the crisis. If public health experts operate alone, policymaking will be incomplete.Footnote ⁸³ Yet if experts beyond public health are consulted, the result may be a cacophony of opinions or a toppling of public health as the chief concern.Footnote ⁸⁴ Further complicating things, most of these experts in public health or other fields are not elected. Since they were not voted into office and cannot be voted out, some elected officials see them as inferior, and some members of the public fear their unaccountability.Footnote ⁸⁵ For non-specialists it is easy to suspect, and difficult to disprove, that experts are both out of touch and out of reach.

As research on epistemic communities and anti-elitism shows, accepting the benefits of a profession's work also requires accepting a certain amount of risk.Footnote ⁸⁶ During some crises of the past century, many people have been willing to do that—particularly if they trusted their political leaders, who vouched that the experts, too, could be trusted. But in the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis, that did not happen uniformly.Footnote ⁸⁷ The pandemic hit during a time when citizens and governments in key places around the world were exhibiting polarization, populism, and a backlash against globalists.Footnote ⁸⁸ A lack of elite consensus made divided reactions to experts more likely,Footnote ⁸⁹ and although there are upsides to permitting unelected experts to steer policy, conspicuous segments of the population focused on the (ever-present) downsides instead.Footnote ⁹⁰

An Agenda for Research

These patterns—the tendency to blame IGOs, the temptation to prioritize narrow or short-term interests, and the divided reaction to experts—look very different from the way Kofi Annan urged the world to handle problems without passports. Yet if the former UN Secretary-General were alive today, he would probably look at the COVID-19 pandemic with dismay, but not surprise. After all, Annan's recommendations are about how people should respond, and he was well aware of obstacles to multilateral, far-sighted, apolitical responses. He readily acknowledged that IGOs were precarious, that people's sense of a shared global fate was embryonic, and that isms such as nationalism or populism still held appeal.Footnote ⁹¹

Indeed, IR scholarship helps to make sense of the three patterns. Research on bureaucracy and institutional design examines the challenge of making IGOs accountable to member-states but also insulated from them; research on delegation and socialization exposes governments’ hardships overcoming time-inconsistency and non-credible commitments; and research on epistemic communities and anti-elitism reveals both upsides and downsides for permitting public policy to be formulated by unelected experts. This is how the world can look without a resolute leader to surmount natural aversions to IGOs and the wider interests or specialized knowledge that they embody.Footnote ⁹²

Therefore, even though the pandemic seems extraordinary, its initial political patterns are quite ordinary. That does not mean, however, that no questions remain. In fact, two important sets of questions need to be explored further.

The first set is retrospective: In what ways have current conditions resulted from ordinary IR patterns interacting with specific developments in domestic politics? Blaming IGOs, prioritizing narrow or short-term interests, and reacting in a divided way to experts are recurrent temptations—and yet, at some times in the past, those temptations have been overcome. So what exactly is different about those times, compared to today?

One place to look is within the United States, which has played a pivotal historical role in maintaining order, stability, and institutions at the international level. In recent years, party polarization has reflected and fueled internal divisions in the US, where influential segments of the government and population now exhibit fatigue with global leadership and a craving to “put America first.” The IR literature reveals natural aversions to IGOs, wider interests, and experts—and further attention to developments in US domestic politics could help to explain why resolute leaders step up and surmount these aversions at some points, but not others.

Another place to look is the overall population of states: particular sentiments may be gaining traction in multiple places at the same time. For instance, populism and anti-elitism can take various forms, such as championing folk wisdom, economic protectionism, outlying areas, unilateralism, or nationalism. But when such sentiments take hold in numerous countries concurrently, they pose a serious challenge to formal expertise, economic liberalization, cosmopolitan cores, multilateralism, and globalism. The IR literature reveals that deferring to experts, entrusting tasks to IGOs, and pursuing broader or longer-term interests involve pains as well as gains. Further attention to trends in domestic politics in countries throughout the world could help to explain conditions under which people tend to fixate on the pains, rather than the gains.

Besides these retrospective questions involving domestic politics, a second set of questions is forward-looking and centers on IGOs. How should the performance of intergovernmental organizations be gauged and addressed? As scholarship shows, IGOs are vulnerable due to all three patterns explored above: in addition to being disparaged directly, they embody the wider interests and specialized knowledge that are also being snubbed. Yet while existing research makes sense of the struggles of the World Health Organization and other IGOs, it offers far less guidance on what to do about them.Footnote ⁹³ How can IGO performance be sensibly evaluated? And if poor performance is uncovered, which remedies are best?

A core difficulty is that IGOs are expected to be responsive to their member-states and also strive for the greater good.Footnote ⁹⁴ As one former WHO Director-General emphasized, “It's not a question of what one or several governments ask you to do; we are working for humanity.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Since member-states are prone to scapegoat IGOs and are conflicted on the broader or longer-term interests that IGOs embody, it is untenable for IGO performance assessments to be derived from states alone. Researchers must begin by incorporating assessments from a variety of state and non-state actors.Footnote ⁹⁶ Then they can turn to two policy-relevant questions.

First, when should evaluations of intergovernmental organizations take place? A testable hypothesis is that IGO evaluations are most useful if they occur at regular intervals. Pandemics and other emergencies heighten demands for performance reviews on a post hoc basis, but conducting reviews at regular intervals would make it more likely that some reviews would occur during periods of relative calm. That would afford less tense circumstances for isolating factors and actors to be thanked or blamed. Moreover, post hoc reviews might give an anomalous snapshot, whereas evaluations at regular intervals could reveal more about day-to-day operations and even uncover issues before they become emergencies.

Second, if an IGO is found to be faltering, what is to be done? Here there are many knowledge gaps, because the tools and conditions for improving IGOs are still under-examined. Governments’ proclivity is to punish or marginalize IGOs that displease them,Footnote ⁹⁷ but it is unclear whether that actually does much good. After all, if an organization proves to be a poor performer, the knee-jerk reaction is to abandon or starve it, but a counter-intuitive (and potentially superior) response would be to feed it. Future research would be incredibly helpful if it investigated not only reform outcomes, but also a wider variety of reform options.

Such practical questions are crucial for the embattled World Health Organization in the COVID-19 crisis. However, the need for answers also goes beyond the WHO to whatever global challenges lie ahead. The next crisis could involve climate change, economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, another pandemic, or something else entirely.Footnote ⁹⁸ It could be an undreamed-of “black swan,” or an obvious and looming “gray rhino.”Footnote ⁹⁹ But whatever the form, without a resolute leader the next crisis is likely to produce similar patterns: negative reactions to IGOs as well as the wider interests and expertise that IGOs represent. The world has exhibited these patterns at various points in the past and will exhibit them again in the future.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ IR scholarship does an adequate job of explaining why the patterns recur. With more work, it could also say more about how to assess and address IGO performance in response.