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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. <br /> Points for practitioners <br /> 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.
Focusing on forest policy and urban climate politics in Brazil and Indonesia, the primary objective of this chapter is to identify domestic pioneers and leaders who, compared to other sectors, governmental levels or jurisdictions within the same nation-state, move ‘ahead of the troops’ (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017: 2-3). The chapter focuses especially on the role of multilevel governance in bringing about pioneership and leadership and on the different types of that have emerged. It also explores whether and, if so, to what extent domestic pioneers and leaders attract followers and whether there are signs of sustained domestic leadership. The chapter identifies the actors that constitute pioneers and leaders and assesses the processes which lead to their emergence. The chapter authors take up Wurzel et al.’s (2019) call to open up the black box of the nation-state. But instead of stressing the role of non-state actors, the chapter authors focus on vertical interactions among different governmental levels within nation states. The main argument put forward is that international and transnational processes, incentives, and ideas often trigger the development of domestic pioneership and leadership. Such processes, however, cannot be understood properly if domestic politics and dynamics across governmental levels within the nation-state are not taken into account.