TY - JOUR
A1 - Hecke, Steven van
A1 - Fuhr, Harald
A1 - Wolfs, Wouter
T1 - The politics of crisis management by regional and international organizations in fighting against a global pandemic
BT - the member states at a crossroads
JF - International review of administrative sciences : an international journal of comparative public administration
N2 - Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organizations recently went through turbulent times due to 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 understanding the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve, 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 funding for their operations, different degrees of 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.
KW - autonomy
KW - COVID-19
KW - crisis management
KW - European Union
KW - International
KW - Monetary Fund
KW - international organizations
KW - multilateralism
KW - World Bank
KW - World Health Organization
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320984516
SN - 0020-8523
SN - 1461-7226
VL - 87
IS - 3
SP - 672
EP - 690
PB - Sage
CY - Los Angeles, Calif. [u.a.]
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Richter, Jonas
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
A1 - Feil, Hauke
A1 - Herold, Jana
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Birds of a feather?
BT - the determinants of impartiality perceptions of the IMF and the World Bank
JF - Review of international political economy
N2 - The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations' (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.
KW - Impartiality
KW - bias
KW - International Financial Institutions
KW - International
KW - Monetary Fund
KW - World Bank
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1749711
SN - 0969-2290
SN - 1466-4526
VL - 28
IS - 5
SP - 1249
EP - 1273
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -