The politics of crisis management by regional and international organizations in fighting against a global pandemic: the member states at a crossroads
| Author | Steven Van Hecke,Wouter Wolfs,Harald Fuhr |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320984516 |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
The politics of crisis
management by regional
and international
organizations in
fighting against a global
pandemic: the member
states at a crossroads
Steven Van Hecke
KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium
Harald Fuhr
University of Potsdam, Germany
Wouter Wolfs
KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium
Abstract
Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organ-
izations recently went through turbulent times dueto a lack of support from several of
their member states. Next to this crisis of multilateralism, the COVID-19 pandemic
now seems to question the added value of international organizations for addressing
global governance issues more specifically. This article analyses this double challenge
that several organizations are facing and compares their ways of managing the crisis by
looking at their institutional and political context, their governance structure, and their
behaviour during the pandemic until June 2020. More specifically, it will explain the
different and fragmented responses of the World Health Organization, the European
Union and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. With the aim of understand-
ing the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve,
Corresponding author:
Steven Van Hecke, KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Parkstraat 45, Box 3609, Leuven 3000, Belgium.
Email: steven.vanhecke@kuleuven.be
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852320984516
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2021, Vol. 87(3)672–690
this article argues that the level of autonomy vis-a-vis the member states is crucial for
understanding the politics of crisis management.
Points for practitioners
As intergovernmental bodies, international organizations require authorization by their
member states. Since they also need fundingfor their operations, different degreesof
autonomy also matter for reacting to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19
pandemic. The potential for international organizations is limited, though through
proactive and bold initiatives, they can seize the opportunity of the crisis and partly
overcome institutional and political constraints.
Keywords
autonomy, COVID-19, crisis management, European Union, International Monetary
Fund, international organizations, multilateralism, World Bank, World Health
Organization
Introduction
1
‘We are at a moment of truth’, stated French President Emmanuel Macron (Mallet
and Khalaf, 2020), referring to the lack of European solidarity and the future of
globalization. A couple of days before, and as cited in the Introduction to this
Special Issue, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (2020) had claimed
that ‘[t]he corona pandemic will forever alter the world order’. Indeed, COVID-19
is not only a struggle of states to manage a severe crisis, including a struggle over
the best way to respond to it domestically; it is also another stress test for interstate
relations, as well as the multilateral system, especially regional and global inter-
national organizations (IOs).
IOs are currently facing a double challenge. On the one hand, they have been
largely criticized over several years for not being representative of the actual bal-
ance of power (with the rise of new giants like China and India, and continents like
Africa and South America) or even considered to be ‘outdated’ or ‘obsolete’
(Parker, 2016; The Guardian, 2017). This lack of support by several of the IOs’
member states (MS) has damaged both their legitimacy and ability to act in order
to tackle global challenges like climate change, digitalization or the fight against
poverty. This was particularly evident in crisis situations (such as the war in Syria)
during which IOs were unable to play a decisive role.
On the other hand, the COVID-19 crisis requires a global response. As such, the
pandemic seems to deepen the question of whether IOs are fit for the job, namely,
addressing global governance issues in a coordinated way. In other words, a new,
temporal problem like COVID-19 seems to have come on top of old, structural
problems (Dekker et al., 2019). The question is therefore: how did these IOs react?
673
Van Hecke et al.
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