The WHO is designed to take advantage of the benefits of cooperation on health. It provides a loosely centralized agency where governments can share information about health and threats to health and get assistance in dealing with both new emergencies and long-running problems. COVID-19 provides an illustration of the WHO’s capacity and limits in the face of new threats to health. More than any other organization in this book, the WHO has taken on partnerships with private organizations to fund and organize its programs, and the organization therefore provides an intriguing illustration of the hybridization of global authority between public agencies and private foundations.

On the 19th of September 2016, during the UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants, the IOM Director General and the UN Secretary General formalized a new agreement between their two institutions. The Agreement was heralded as transforming IOM into a ‘UN-related’ organization, and was followed by IOM’s rebranding to ‘IOM-UN Migration’, thus fostering the impression that IOM had, for the first time, become part of the UN. Yet, as a matter of law, the relationship had not significantly changed. In fact, compared with the 1996 UN-IOM relationship agreement, the 2016 iteration diminished aspects of cooperation and lines of accountability between the two organizations. IOM independence from the UN, as well as its ‘non-normative status’, were expressly recognized for first time in an agreement between the two entities. This chapter assesses the differences between the initial UN-IOM relationship agreement in 1996 and that concluded in 2016. It explains why the disconnect between the legal effect of the 2016 Agreement and the public impression of it are important, and makes suggestions for possible reform. In doing so, it unpacks what is meant by ‘UN-related organization’, explains how these organizations differ from UN specialized agencies, and considers why the latter status was avoided.