[[Interesting Phrase]] “[[Problems without passports]]” are challenges that disregard national borders, threatening people in many different nation-states. The phrase was popularized in 2009 by former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who saw issues such as pollution, weapons proliferation, and organized crime as humanity’s shared enemies. To deal with these issues, Annan urged governments and the public to work through international intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), collaborate on collective long-term solutions, and defer to experts with specialized knowledge.1 In other words, the response to problems without passports should be multilateral, far-sighted, and apolitical. > The COVID-19 pandemic, countries defied each of Annan's prescriptions, producing three patterns. 1. Tendecy to blame IGOs: More than 100 countries demanded an independent investigation into the [[World Health Organization (WHO)]] response to the disease. Even researchers and non-governmental organizations that tried to defend the organization sounded apologetic, noting that the WHO’s “monolithic” bureaucracy makes it slow and its competing member-states make it timid. But the United States government went furthest in its blame. Declaring that the organization had bungled repeatedly and “cost many lives,” the US announced it would end its role as the WHO’s largest financial contributor. This relates to a second pattern: a temptation. 2. Temptation to prioritize narrow or short-term interests: Many public health experts decried the US government’s de-funding move as selfish and myopic. For instance, a former WHO official warned it would jeopardize poor countries’“main lifeline,” and the president of the American Medical Association declared it made finding a solution “dramatically more challenging.” But the US was hardly unique in indulging narrow or short-term interests. Against the advice of the World Health Organization, approximately eighty countries restricted exports of essential medical supplies and approximately 160 countries banned foreign travelers. 3. Divided reaction to experts: Variation arose within and across countries as some government leaders and members of the public deferred to public health experts but others contested them. For instance, many national health advisors were like-minded in recommending intense and far-reaching countermeasures such as lockdowns or contact-tracing—but although countries such as New Zealand and South Korea readily heeded the advice, countries such as Brazil and Russia resisted. And in a sign of governments’ diverging views on experts in the WHO, a UN Security Council resolution on COVID-19 stalled for months as China insisted that the resolution endorse the World Health Organization, but the United States demanded that it not be mentioned at all. The three patterns defy what Kofi Annan recommended for handling problems without passports, and international relations (IR) scholarship helps to explain why. 1. Research on *bureaucracy* and *institutional design* examines the challenge of making IGOs accountable to member-states but also insulated from them. 2. Research on *delegation* and *socialization* exposes governments’ hardships overcoming time-inconsistency and non-credible commitments. 3. Research on [[transnational expert networks (TENs)|epistemic communities]] and *anti-elitism* reveals upsides and downsides for permitting public policy to be formulated by technocratic experts. > Together, these veins show how the world can look without resolute leadership that overcomes commonplace resistance to IGOs, to broader or longer-term interests, and to experts. Thus, although the pandemic may be extraordinary, its political patterns are quite ordinary. ## Pattern 1: Tendecy to blame IGOs Like other IGOs, the [[World Health Organization (WHO)]] 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. ==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. 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. Yet formal rules, a division of labor, and a hierarchical structure—even if functioning flawlessly—also make bureaucracies seem impersonal, narrow, and regimented. ==Bureaucracy carries negative connotations of “faceless bureaucrats” who are mired in “red tape” and are aloof from those they serve==. 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. 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==. [[Insulation should be designed in an ideal degree where it will not attract blame and promote effectiveness and transparency, making the IGOs both accountable and protected]] 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. 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. 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. Moreover, both relatively high insulation and relatively low insulation attract blame. > 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. 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. 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. ## Pattern 2: The Temptation to Prioritize Narrow or Short-Term Interests > It's quite understandable for me, because the state is responsible for their own people in the first place before the international community. Two alternative solutions: delegations and socializations. **Delegation**, in which a "principal" (a set of nation-stakes) makes a revocable grant of authority to an "agent" (IGO staff), empowering the agent to act on the principal's behalf. Over time, over repeated interactions, agents can hone their abilities to perform delegated tasks, and principals can adopt a more sanguine win some/lose some mentality toward one another. **Socialization** means a process to induct newcomers into particular modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. Through recurring interactions, a state develops or changes how it understands its role, responsibilities, and interests. ==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.== 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 IGOs and the broader post-World War II “liberal world order.” ==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.== [[Question]] Both delegation and socialization have their own failsafe. What are they? The success of delegation hinges on IGO-agents having sufficient insulation from their state-principals to act as a buffer. Otherwise, the state will impede or reverse what their agents do. Socialization hinges on wide-spread and continuous grooming of a group identity; without such grooming, states will simply revert to their narrow or short-term interests. [[Question]]What did COVID-19 pandemic prove on socialization and delegation failsafe? 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. Meanwhile, the United States has exhibited “hegemonic fatigue.” 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. 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==. 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. 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.” [[Interesting Phrase]]People see that the hospitals are not overwhelmed, and they don’t understand why their shops have to shut. They only look at what’s happening here, not the situation in, say, New York or Spain. This is the prevention paradox, and for many Germans I’m the evil guy who is crippling the economy. 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==. ## Pattern 3: The Divided Reaction to Experts [[Interesting Phrase]] International relations scholarship helps to explain the divided reaction to experts, who appear most explicitly in work on “[[epistemic communities]].” 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. [[Open Question]] [[Could policymaking ever be apolitical?]] By time, international development reflected optimism that by moving authority from power-hungry nation-states to professionalized supranational experts in IGOs and elsehwere, so policymaking could be more stable, efficient, and neutral. In short, policymaking could be apolitical. However, scholars also explored the downside of epistemic communities. Maybe, policymaking could never be fully apolitical. Surely individual experts (and sometimes entire professions) have political leanings, so how could their advice ever be completely free of politics? 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. Use some form of rigorous analysis to synthesize the evidence. 2. Test hypotheses and be poised to modify recommendations accordingly. 3. Advise on the implications—direct and indirect, immediate and eventual—of various policy options. > 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. 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. 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. For nonspecialists it is easy to suspect, and difficult to disprove, that experts are both out of touch and out of reach ## An Agenda for Research Two questions to explore: [[Open Question]] 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. [[Open Question]] 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. 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. 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.” 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. The whole situation can turn to two policy-relevant questions: 1. ==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. 2. ==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 underexamined. Governments’ proclivity is to punish or marginalize IGOs that displease them,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 (WHO)]] 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.98 It could be an undreamed-of “black swan,” or an obvious and looming “gray rhino.”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.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. ## References **Author** Tana Johnson is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at [email protected].