GLOBAL DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL POLICY

# **International Organizations in Global Social Governance**

Edited by **Kerstin Martens Dennis Niemann Alexandra Kaasch**

# Global Dynamics of Social Policy

Series Editors Lorraine Frisina Doetter University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Delia González de Reufels University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Kerstin Martens University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Marianne Sandvad Ulriksen University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark

#### **About the Series**

The intervention of states in felds such as health, social security and work, dates back to the nineteenth century, and became more dynamic over time. Imperial Prussia, a social policy pioneer, frst showcased its progress at the Paris World Fair in 1900: the Prussian exhibit drew large crowds eager to fnd out more about state pensions. Clearly, social policy had become a matter of great interest to states and citizens alike.

Other nations soon embarked on implementing discrete social policies, thus turning the twentieth century into a time of remarkable welfare state expansion. The end of World War II marked a new departure, as an increasing number of countries outside the Western hemisphere began to introduce social policy measures. States not only copied established forms of welfare, but often developed measures *sui-generis* to meet their specifc needs. While episodes of policy retrenchment and ruptures can be observed over time, recent developments point to an expansion of social policies in low-to-upper-middle-income countries of the Global South. Social policy has thus become a global phenomenon.

It is generally accepted that the state is responsible for welfare and that domestic politics and ideas have been a primary driver of its expansion. However, in an increasingly interconnected world, social policy is implemented at the national-level but infuenced by international developments and relations. It is shaped by trade, migration, war, and colonialism. Just as people travel, policy ideas follow. These factors merit scholarly attention and demand interdisciplinary collaboration to generate new insights into the global dimension of social policy.

This is what the Global Dynamics of Social Policy book series sets out to accomplish. In doing so, it also contributes to the mission of the Collaborative Research Center 1342 (CRC) "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen, Germany. Funded by the German Research Foundation, the CRC leaves behind the traditionally OECD-focused analysis of social policy to stress the transnational interconnectedness of developments.

The book series showcases scholarship by colleagues worldwide who are interested in the global dynamics of social policy. Studies can range from in-depth case studies, comparative work and large quantitative research. Moreover, the promotion of scholarship by young researchers is of great importance to the series. The series is published in memory of Stephan Leibfried to whom our research on state and social policy at the CRC is indebted in countless ways.

> Series Editors: Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Delia González de Reufels, Kerstin Martens, Marianne S. Ulriksen

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16294

Open access of this publication was made possible through funding by the Collaborative Research Center 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy at the University of Bremen, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 374666841 – SFB 1342 and Specialised Information Service Political Science – POLLUX.

Kerstin Martens Dennis Niemann • Alexandra Kaasch Editors

# International Organizations in Global Social Governance

*Editors* Kerstin Martens Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Dennis Niemann Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Alexandra Kaasch Faculty of Sociology Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9

ISSN 2661-8672 ISSN 2661-8680 (electronic) Global Dynamics of Social Policy ISBN 978-3-030-65438-2 ISBN 978-3-030-65439-9 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication.

**Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

Chapters 2, 4 and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

# Acknowledgments

This book is based on an authors' workshop held at the University of Bremen in May 2019. As the editors we are grateful to the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen and the Institute for World Society Studies at Bielefeld University for supporting not only us, but also the other experts on IOs and social policy issues who participated in this event. The Bremen CRC 1342 is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342. The workshop aimed at improving our understanding of the role of International Organizations in Global Social Policy by mapping them and analyzing their discourses. We are grateful to the workshop participants, who contributed signifcantly to the development of this book with their expertise and experience, and to a number of people without whom the realization of this volume would not have been possible. Special thanks go to Armando Barrientos, Chris Deeming, Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Sigrid Hartong, Matias Margulis, and Heiko Pleines, who commented on and contributed to individual sessions. We also want to thank Nicole Henze and Gabrielle Bieser for having perfectly organized the symposium, and Monika Sniegs, who together with Nicole and Gabrielle contributed signifcantly to the content alignment of the book.

# Praise for *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*

"Although international organizations have long played a substantial role in social policy, scholarly research on their nature, discourse, and impact has only taken off in the last few decades. Featuring a strong line-up of contributors, this edited volume maps international organizations and their discourses across an impressive number of social policy areas ranging from health and labour to immigration and family policy. This excellent volume is a must read for those interested in global social policy."

> —Daniel Béland, *James McGill Professor of Political Science, McGill University, Canada*

"Recognizing and appreciating the dynamics of Global Social Governance is all the more important these days in our global 'community of fate. First, this volume provides an invaluable conceptual understanding of the causes and consequences of cross-border social issues. Second, the authors recount how international organizations have evolved and expanded not only as public service providers with innovations in policy delivery but also as power-holders in social governance through a strong capacity to defne the parameters of policy."

> —Diane Stone, *Professor of Transnational Governance, European University Institute, Italy*

"What role do international organizations (IOs) play in social policy worldwide? Some posit that IOs refect the will of their constituent states. However, other scholars have found that IOs have substantial autonomy, generate their own ideas, and learn from their environments and experiences, acting as "forums for exchange, contention, and cooperation." With chapters covering a wide range of policy domains, every student of global social policy will need to check out this excellent book"

> —Mitchell A. Orenstein, *Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania, US*

# Contents





# Notes on Contributors

**Ross Fergusson** is Senior Lecturer of Social Policy at The Open University (OU), UK. His research interests are in socially excluded young people, the relationships between social policy and youth criminal justice, and youth unemployment internationally. Recent books he has written include: *Young People, Welfare and Crime: Governing Non-participation* (2016); and (with Nicola Yeates) *Global Youth Unemployment* (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2021). His PhD, by published work, is in Social Policy and Criminology (Open University, UK).

**Martin Heneghan** is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is researching the impact of Brexit on fnancial centers in the UK. His PhD was undertaken at the University of Sheffeld. It focused on international organizations and how they compete and cooperate to shape pension and social protection policies.

**Jakob Henninger** is a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen and an affliated fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science. His research focuses on immigrant welfare rights, the welfare state, and civil society activism.

**Anna Holzscheiter** is Professor of International Politics at TU Dresden in Germany. She is also Head of the Research Group on "Governance for Global Health" at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin. She has done research and published on norms in international relations, discourse analysis, non-state actors in international politics, human rights—especially the rights of children and young people—and on global social policy, including health policy in particular. Her current research focuses on institutional complexity in global health, as well as norm collisions in international politics.

**Alexandra Kaasch** is Professor in German and Transnational Social Policy at Bielefeld University, Germany. She was previously a senior researcher at the University of Bremen and a lecturer at the University of Sheffeld. Her research interests include global social policy and governance, comparative social policy, and international organizations. She is lead editor of the journal *Global Social Policy* and co-editor of the book series *Research in Comparative and Global Social Policy*. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffeld, UK. Among her recent publications is a Special Issue in Global Social Policy in honor of Bob Deacon.

**Nina Kolleck** is a professor at Leipzig University in Germany. She holds a PhD in Political Science and a Habilitation in Educational Science (postdoctoral qualifcation) from Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include social network analysis, education policy, comparative and international education research, heterogeneity, sustainability, innovations, and educational reforms.

**Silvana Lakeman** holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen, where she has worked as an early stage researcher and Marie Curie fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Her research evaluates the involvement and inter-agency cooperation of organizations in the areas of migration, environmental and disaster displacement, climate change, and disaster risk reduction. She has worked in both a research and advisory capacity for a range of international and non-governmental organizations. She holds an MA in International Relations from Leiden University and a BA in Economics, Politics, and International Relations from University College Dublin.

**Thuy Dung Le** is Marie Curie Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Her research interests are situated in the feld of global regulatory governance and political economy, focusing on actors in transnational and state regulation processes of labor standards. Her current work examines the interplays between Western laborrelated development aids and trade policy with strategic intermediary pro-labor interventions in contribution to the promotion of labor standards in developing countries.

**Rianne Mahon** is a distinguished research professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She has published on industrial policy, labor market restructuring, childcare politics, and the redesign of welfare regimes on a local, national, and global scale. She has also co-edited numerous books, most recently *Achieving the Social Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges* (with S. Horton and S. Dalby). Her current work focuses on the "gendering" of global governance, with particular reference to migration.

**Kerstin Martens** is Professor of International Relations at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include education policy, NGOs, and international organizations, in particular the OECD and the UN. She heads the research project A05 "The Global Development, Diffusion and Transformation of Education Systems" as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. She has published widely on the above-mentioned research areas, including in leading international journals. She holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

**Dennis Niemann** is a post-doctoral researcher in the project A05 "The Global Development, Diffusion and Transformation of Education Systems" at the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen. His research interests include the internationalization of education policy, qualitative methods, and the role of international organizations in global governance. He has published on the soft governance infuence of international organizations, on domestic policy-making, and on recent internationalization processes in the feld of education policy in international journals such as *German Politics*, *Publius: The Journal of Federalism*, *Global Social Policy*, and *European Journal of Education*.

**Jane Pillinger** is an independent researcher and policy advisor working with key organizations in the areas of social policy, migration, employment, and gender equality. She has carried out research and policy advice for global unions, social partner organizations, international organizations such as the ILO, IOM, and UNWomen, as well as for national and European organizations and advocacy movements. She is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at The Open University.

**Friederike Römer** is a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen, as well as a 2019/2020 John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In her research, she focuses on social inequality, migration, and welfare state institutions. In her current project, she investigates the relationship between regional integration and immigrant rights.

**Jeremy J. Schmidt** is Assistant Professor of Geography at Durham University. His research focuses on the social dimensions of water, land, and energy in the context of an Earth system increasingly transformed by human action. He is the author of *Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity* and the co-editor of *Water Ethics: Foundational Readings for Students and Professionals.* He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

**Johannes Schuster** is a research associate at Leipzig University in Germany. He holds a BA in Educational Science from the University of Jena and an MA in Educational Research from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and inclusive education, the diffusion of social innovations and social network analysis.

**Anna Wolkenhauer** is a research associate at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. Her PhD dealt with post-retrenchment state formation through social policy, based on qualitative feldwork in Zambia. Her research focuses on social policy and agriculture in Southern Africa, processes of knowledge production in global social policy, and the question how austerity has shaped the ways of doing politics in the countryside.

**Nicola Yeates** is Professor of Social Policy at The Open University, UK. Her research interests focus on global social policy as a feld of academic study and as a political practice. She has published widely in this feld. Her research monographs include *International Health Worker Migration and Recruitment: Global Governance, Politics and Policy* (with J. Pillinger, 2019) and *Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains* (Palgrave, 2009). She has been closely involved in the journal of *Global Social Policy* (Sage) since it was founded in 2000 and is a former editor of it.

# Abbreviations




#### xxii Abbreviations




# List of Figures


# List of Tables


# Introduction

# The Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance: Examining Populations and Discourses of International Organizations in Social Policies

*Dennis Niemann, Kerstin Martens, and Alexandra Kaasch*

## Introduction

International Organizations (IOs) are vibrant actors of global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention, and cooperation on social policies. IOs prepare, guide, and supervise international treaties about welfare issues which states sign and adhere to. They direct, fnance,

This chapter is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

D. Niemann (\*) • K. Martens

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail: dniemann@uni-bremen.de; martensk@uni-bremen.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 3

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_1

and implement projects which affect people's lives. The World Bank, for example, has been identifed as having had a signifcant impact on social policy development in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in some countries in Latin America with regard to pension systems. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considerably fueled the German debate on appropriate education systems, and the United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF) is a very visible actor when it comes to development aid for children. The study of IOs in general has advanced tremendously in recent decades. Today, we have a much better understanding of different types of global actors and their mechanisms of infuence. However, our knowledge about the involvement of IOs varies signifcantly by policy feld. While scholarship on IOs often focuses on issue areas like security, economics, or environmental policies, we know comparatively little about the specifc roles of IOs in social policies. Furthermore, within global social policy and governance studies, there have been very few systematic attempts to analyze different social policy felds in their dimension of global actor involvement.

With this book, we intend to enhance and systematize our understanding of IOs in global social governance. It provides studies on a variety of social policy felds in which different, but also the same, IOs operate. Basically, the chapters in this book have *two purposes*: On the one hand, they shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs. They explore how a particular global social policy feld is constituted as a whole, and which are the dominant IOs setting the trends. On the other hand, the contributions examine the *discourses* within and between these IOs on the respective social policies. Thus, the chapters present the ideas IOs are promoting as well as their policies and leitmotifs which guide the discourses they produce. By examining the population of IOs and their discourses in different policy felds, the book both gathers insights from different projects on global social policy felds and opens the foor for comparing IO involvement in those felds. We generate new insights and future steps for describing and theorizing global social governance as an *architecture of arguments*. By this, we refer to the specifc and varying constellations of IOs in different social policy felds and their patterns of discourse that characterize global social policies.

A. Kaasch

Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: alexandra.kaasch@uni-bielefeld.de

In this introduction, we frst briefy recap in broad strokes the knowledge about the purposes, functions, and characteristics of IOs in general, and their involvement in social policy issues. Thus, we look at 'public' organizations, namely at IOs which are understood as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), in which states are the prime members. We then set out some basic conceptualizations for studying IOs in global social governance before specifying our framework for exploring populations and discourses of IOs in global social policies. Complementing liberal and constructivist International Relations (IR) theories, we use organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for our analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance. 'Populations' are identifed as the dominant as well as regional IOs active in a specifc social policy issue; they are analyzed in their current state but also from a historical perspective. In this volume, the concept of 'discourse' is understood as the strategic way in which individuals or collective actors frame ideas, and not as a structural understanding of how certain meanings infuence behavior.

Overall, despite intense scholarly work focusing on IOs, looking at specifc policy felds and the roles, characteristics, or functions of single IOs and of IOs within their organizational contexts is surprisingly underdeveloped. Furthermore, the differences between such IO populations across different social policy felds are still rarely explored. Although IOs are one of the major components of global social policy and their prominence and infuence in international life has steadily grown over the last decades, we need deeper research about how the population of IOs active in social policy is constituted and to better understand what discourses IOs actually spread in social policy, as they aim to infuence national policies or the international community by means of soft governance with these discourses. This volume seeks to complement research on IOs in social policy by addressing the following sets of research questions:


We fnd that diverse IOs populate the different social policy felds—for a long time and with signifcant impact on the different discourses. While some have been around for a century or even longer, IO activity is fairly new in other felds. All social policy felds are populated by a variety of IOs which consist of universal IOs, but often also regional organizations occupying particular niches. Some IOs, like the International Labour Organization (ILO) or World Bank, are present in multiple social policy felds and shape them by putting forward their ideas. With few exceptions, IOs active in global social policy mainly exert soft governance. They develop and broadcast ideas and norms about social policy issues which are transmitted into national systems. They are recognized normative players due to their reputation in the feld. Overall, we fnd a highly sophisticated architecture of arguments in global social policy which builds on a dense population of IOs and the discourses they spread. The different discourses in the studied social policy felds have idiosyncratic structures but also feature some commonalities. Often, the discourses of IOs are infuenced by general global political and economic developments, like the rise of neoliberalism or globalization.

#### Studying IOs and Social Policy

Different types of actors can be identifed in global social policies. These include civil society organizations, digital movements, formations of states, or even individuals (Kaasch and Martens 2015). In this book, however, we turn our focus exclusively to IOs in order to develop a more profound understanding of the variation of IO infuence in different social policy felds. Nevertheless, despite the long existence of a continuous scholarship on IOs, there is no commonly accepted defnition of the term 'international organization'. However, there is widespread agreement on the characteristics of IOs. As a minimum, IOs are interpreted as international bodies that have been set up through a treaty between nations and thus have an international, legally binding character. Furthermore, IOs have structural bodies which are operating on a continual basis.

For the purposes of studying IOs in social policy, we employ the following defnition: An international organization is a formal institutional arrangement created by an international treaty between at least three sovereign states or government agencies of states and has a permanent organizational body, including a secretariat, staff, headquarters, and a charter that addresses its mission and purpose. Such a defnition follows common practice in IO research (Hooghe et al. 2015) and excludes other international bodies that are not founded by states, such as NGOs (e.g. Amnesty International) as well as those bodies that lack a permanent organizational underpinning, such as groupings or coalitions of states (e.g. the G8/20).1 Among the tasks and functions of IOs are that they prepare, guide, and supervise international treaties. They also direct, fnance, and implement projects, and exercise many more duties such as providing arenas for exchange, networking, and debate.

Scholarly research on IOs has dealt with them, for the most part, within the discipline of International Relations (see e.g. Keohane and Nye 1974; Hurd 2011; Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Nielson and Tierney 2003). IOs have long been participants of international life and they play a signifcant role in managing cooperation, providing forums for multilateral exchange, and in disseminating norms. Thus, research on IOs has focused on "why these phenomena exist, how they function and what effects they have on world politics" (Martin and Simmons 2013, 326). Recent research projects have also dealt with the performance of IOs and their policy output (Tallberg et al. 2013, 2014), as well as the design of IOs in relation to their assigned authority (Hooghe and Marks 2014, Hooghe et al. 2015; Zürn 2018; Abbott et al. 2014). Consequently, multiple theoretical approaches have been developed and applied to the study of IOs and their roles in the international community. As part of these diverse studies, the perception of IOs changes in accordance with developments in international relations. Refecting these different perspectives, scholars conceptualize IOs as either 'instruments', 'arenas', 'actors', 'bureaucracies' or 'resources' (e.g. Hurd 2011; Barkin 2006).

In the research on social policy, the attention to the role of IOs has emerged from studies on transition and developing countries. While in traditional welfare state research, the units of analysis used to be national contexts, actors, and institutions, most countries outside of a narrow 'OECD country' view developed forms of social protection with different kinds of transnational involvement. IOs have, for example, been identifed as important in designing schemes of social protection in Central and

1While the term IO has long been used for organizations founded by governments, the globalized turn in international relations also strengthened the interpretation of internationally operating and non-governmental organizations as being IOs. In this context, the term IGOs was introduced to distinguish governmental from non-governmental actors. Either way, the signifcance of providing a defnition of the type of organizations dealt with is immanent.

Eastern European countries in the 1990s. In development contexts, the impact of conditionalities on loans, as well as the promotion of specifc schemes of social protection (e.g. Conditional Cash Transfers) by IOs, has been subject to extensive research as well. Theoretical approaches combining different streams of theoretical literature for better capturing global social governance and the role of IOs within have been developed accordingly (Kaasch et al. 2019).

Contributions focusing on the role of specifc IOs in social policy include work on the World Bank (e.g. Ervik 2005; Vetterlein 2007) and the ILO (e.g. Deacon 2015), but also the OECD (e.g. Armingeon and Beyeler 2004; Deacon and Kaasch 2008; Mahon 2009) and the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the feld of global education policy (Lerch and Buckner 2018). What we learn from such contributions is that while each IO does come with a specifc, individual background, constitution, mandate, and working mode, they all coexist in contexts of mutual recognition, exchange, struggle, collaboration, and so on (e.g. Deacon 2007; Yeates 2008; Deacon 2013; Kaasch 2015; Kaasch and Martens 2015).

Moreover, it is hard to determine the value and quality of impact in a generalized way—even for one single IO—there are usually multiple messages and working mechanisms that play out differently. How do ideas and policies get diffused and how do norms get implemented? Considering different modes here, the World Bank for example can be the good guy (providing support for implementing social policies) or the bad guy (forcing states to introduce certain reforms) depending on what policy feld we look at. Similarly, looking 'inside' organizational structures, one OECD department can be identifed as producing more social ideas than another one, and both messages may be communicated simultaneously to the public. This also illustrates that IOs are not monolithic actors, but rather complex bureaucracies with possibly competing departments.

In addition, assessing the power of specifc working modes or means of communication is also diffcult. To be sure, there is comparatively little 'hard law' in global social policies, however, depending on the breadth of the concept, human rights law or international regulation may be part of the picture and there we may even fnd enforceable norms. Nevertheless, the only transnational context with something like a more comprehensive social policy is still the European Union (EU). The impact of the EU on social policy is mostly determined by its supranational legal framework in the free movement of labor and, to some extent, health services, as various contributions have shown (e.g. Ferrera 2005; Anderson 2015).

An important task remaining for research is to get a clearer picture of what qualifes as 'impact' or 'infuence'. For instance, Armingeon and Beyeler (2004) argued for the OECD that it has at best little infuence on national social policymaking. Orenstein (2003) and Müller (2003) instead found that the World Bank strongly infuenced the set-up of national pension systems. While the aim of this book is not to analyze the impact that IOs have on specifc national social policy reforms, the changing national discourses generated by global discourses, rankings by IOs, and hard law (e.g. as part of trade agreements) in some policy felds may have both direct and indirect implications and consequences for national social policymaking. Epistemic communities have been identifed as playing a role in several cases. By taking into account how discursive practices shape the understanding of policy goals and appropriate means, we show how IO infuence can be translated onto the state level.

#### Global Governance of Social Policy Fields

In understanding the meaning and impact of IOs from a horizontal perspective, the study of IOs is closely associated with concepts of global governance. For more than two decades, global governance has helped to frame the understanding of how political steering on the international level takes place and to what extent IOs can account for autonomous actions (Muldoon 2004; Mayntz 2008). As a system, global governance builds on normative principles and refexive authorities (Zürn 2018). The notion of global governance is important because, "the purpose of global governance no longer refects solely the interest of states but now also includes other actors" (Barnett and Sikkink 2008, 64). Following this aspect, territorial boundaries and national sovereignty cannot be taken for granted in contemporary policymaking (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006). This also holds true for the involvement of IOs in social issues, despite the general assumption that social issues are dominantly governed by national constituencies.

Thus, an enhanced understanding of political steering processes allows for analyzing mechanisms of governance detached from the state-centric perspective and includes additional, more comprehensive forms of governance. Furthermore, it entails a shift from states to a multiplicity of regulatory actors: from hard to soft law, from formal to informal rules (Mingst 1999, 93). This understanding of governance presents IOs (and other inter- and transnational actors) as having the ability to create, diffuse, and implement rules, norms, and (behavioral) standards through means of soft governance rather than through binding legislation understood as hard law (Abbott and Snidal 2000). In other words, IOs can "use institutional and discursive resources to induce deference from others" (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 5).

In this regard, the discursive actions of IOs become pivotal in the realm of global governance, given that the ways in which issues and problems are framed and perceived play an important role in infuencing policy outcomes. In this vein, IOs can become "knowledge brokers" (Niemann and Martens 2018). They defne social problems, provide answers to them, and distribute the solutions worldwide, often backed by academic research and empirical data. Thus, global social policy research is concerned with questions of who formulates and frames what kinds of ideas, goals, and rights on social protection (Deacon et al. 1997; Deacon 2007). Such kind of research also seeks to answer questions regarding how these processes take place and how they are 'communicated' to other levels of social policymaking (Béland and Orenstein 2013).

# Global Governance as IO Involvement in Social Policy Fields

For the purpose of this book, we study global social governance as the involvement of IOs in different felds of social policy. Concepts and theories vary though with regard to what forms part of social policy (or a 'welfare state'). Such concepts are often driven by the institutional arrangements of ideal types within welfare state regimes. Since the view has broadened so as to include low- and middle-income countries into welfare state analyses, the concept of what may form part of a system of social protection has also widened. Pension and unemployment care schemes usually relate to concepts of social insurance, while food, housing, or water are more about the provision of public goods. Health and care extend to both the provision of services and forms of social insurance against connected risks. Identifying vulnerable groups, such as children or disabled people, is another way of defning and organizing social policy felds. Moreover, when we look at eco-social policies, we can consider both a connection between policy felds, as well as how they may stand for a new form of welfare state conception. In the selection of contributions to this volume, we intend to exemplify several of such 'felds' without constraining ourselves to one specifc understanding of what forms a part of social policy, or one interpretation of how best to break social policy down into further policy felds.

With this approach, we are in line with the character and emergence of international law in relation to social issues and global development goals. The United Nation's International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights refers to fundamental human rights connected to labor, social security, health and care, and education. Many ILO Conventions, especially and most recently the Social Protection Floors Recommendation (R202), specify these social rights as well. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a further refection of the broad and multifold nature of social policy and social protection systems. At the same time, many of these instruments of global social policy also single out vulnerable groups for which they discuss and defne the specifc applications of social policies.

However, when studying the population of social policy IOs, theoretical streams of International Relations hold different factors accountable for IOs being engaged in the feld of social policy. A realists' interest in the activities of IOs is rather limited, as this perspective considers IOs to be institutions associated with refecting the political power structures between states (e.g. Hoffmann 1970; Mearsheimer 1994). The existence and eventual infuence of IOs would thus refect state decision-making in terms of national interest in power perpetuation. Informed by functionalism and rational choice theory, neo-institutionalism views IOs as entities created to manage interdependencies and facilitate cooperation among states (Keohane 1984; Zürn 1998; Keohane and Nye 1977). In this vein, it is argued that IOs are suitable for pooling the interests of different actors and may achieve better outcomes than if states were to act on their own (Martin and Simmons 1998; Weingast 2002). Following this line of thought, IOs should form once a goal that requires international cooperation is defned. They are sustained if the reason for cooperation persists or if the benefts for their involved members outweigh the costs. In any case, an IO's existence depends on the goodwill and preferences of states.

Other approaches to international relations grant IOs more autonomous actorhood. Neoliberalists try to balance IO autonomy and their responsiveness to the demands of member governments (Hawkins et al. 2006; Nielson and Tierney 2003). Thus, an IO's existence is affected by their agent relationship to the state principal. Consequently, it becomes costly for the principal to dissolve its agent once it is installed. According to assumptions of path dependency this cost increases the longer the IO exists and the more institutionalized it becomes. The work of constructivists and others have drawn attention to IOs' nature and the characteristics of their actorhood as well as to the activities of IOs as norm entrepreneurs who are able to infuence state behavior (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001; Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Finnemore 1993; Abbott and Snidal 1998). From this view, IOs are not mere instruments of states. Rather, IOs and their bureaucracies can develop a life of their own, including the defnition of new goals, structures, and modi operandi, eventually being able to infuence state behavior (Niemann 2012). Activities in social policy are therefore also within the hands of the IO itself and can even be dysfunctional to the initial tasks.

Our volume builds up on liberalist and constructivist work, as scholars of these theories emphasize the actorhood of IOs, though to different degrees. Such approaches are a helpful starting point for exploring IOs as important actors in global social governance. However, these classic IR theories are not yet suffcient for exploring what shapes the populations of IOs in a feld and the signifcance of the discourses they produce. Therefore, we complement our analytical framework with a theoretical heuristic, adapting Organizational Ecology and Soft Governance approaches for our purposes.

## Populations of IOs: Organizational Field and Institutional Design

In conceptualizing global social governance as a number of social felds, we are interested in mapping each feld according to the IOs active in it. How a feld is constituted and which IOs populate it is determined by exogenous and endogenous elements. The analytical approach of Organizational Ecology within the study of IR is loosely applied in this volume as a heuristic frame for this aspect of the analyses. It offers a theoretical lens for assessing the developments in the population of social policy IOs. This theoretical account, which stems from biology sciences and was adapted to the social sciences most prominently by Hannan and Freeman (1977, 1986, 1989), was recently revived by Abbott, Green, and Keohane (2016) for studying IOs.

Organizational Ecology is marked by two complementary approaches: *organizational environment* and *intrinsic features* (Abbott et al. 2016). The intrinsic features approach emphasizes endogenous factors of IOs to explain how IOs are capable of acting within a given institutional environment and what accounts for change. The organizational environment approach addresses how this institutional feld is composed and acknowledges external factors and externalities of the IOs' surroundings. Hence, combining both could be seen as a promising analytical tool for developing a framework for examining developments and changes in the realm of (social policy) IOs. Thus, from the perspective of organizational ecology, one focuses on both the constitutive features of the organizational feld and the characteristics of IOs within this feld. In addition, the theoretical view of organizational ecology with its focus on constraining and enabling environmental variables is seen as compatible with actor-centered approaches, which can offer more detailed explanations on how IOs respond to imposed external constraints and opportunities (Abbott et al. 2016, 272–273).

#### *Organizational Field: Topography of IOs*

Organizational environment is related to the sociological concept of an 'organizational feld' and refers to what we call topography. Thus, the topography of an organizational feld comprises underlying characteristics of the feld itself, the density of relevant actors in that feld and their relationship to each other. This concept, also widely used in political science and international relations, marks the aggregate of actors that constitute the institutional environment.

The characteristics of an organizational feld further include the rules and belief systems, as well as the relational networks that arise in the broader societal context (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Scott 1983). In this approach, the environment, which IOs cannot control, is seen as shaping the opportunities for their development and actions. In sum, IO behavior and interactions with others is shaped by the feld's topography.

The organizational environment emphasizes that adaptation to the environment determines the opportunities and scope of action of an IO. Thus, a population is marked by its degree of diversity. This means that in a highly diverse feld, organizations can populate different niches within a community. Also, the density of a population has to be taken into account when analyzing an organizational feld. For instance, the concept of isomorphism emphasizes how organizations act in a highly elaborated environment in which they become more alike in order to gain legitimacy and ultimately increase their impact (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 352).

This means that for an IO in social policy, the ability to shape discourse in a feld is impacted by the number and power of competing, cooperating, and coexisting actors. If many actors hold the same beliefs and ideas, they can form coherent epistemic communities and put forward their claims and positions more easily in a partnership. Accordingly, a homogenous community could generate more leverage to infuence other actors (e.g. domestic governments or other organizational felds). In contrast, if IOs face competition with other IOs (or other actors), they may lose out to those with stronger positions. IOs may also populate and cultivate a niche in some social policy issues and coexist without disturbing the vital interests of states or other IOs. When IOs populate a niche in a population, an important issue in this context is often the question of expertise (Ness and Brechin 1988; Jonsson 1986), which could apply to regionally active IOs that address specifcities.

#### *Institutional Design: Intrinsic Features of IOs*

While the organizational environment approach focuses on the interaction between IOs and their environment, the concept of intrinsic features emphasizes how the institutional design of IOs shapes their behavior and determines how autonomous IOs can act in an organizational feld. On the one hand, it fnds support in rational choice concepts, such as the principal-agent model (Hawkins et al. 2006; Nielson and Tierney 2003), which implies that the designers of IOs can actively infuence the scope of possible actions of an IO. On the other hand, this approach is also congruent with approaches based on path dependency theories of historical institutionalism, as they explain why initial choices may have long-term effects on the future of the organizational development (North 1990; Pierson 2004).2

<sup>2</sup>This is in line with one early observation by Stinchcombe (1965), who argues that organizations incorporate and preserve institutional characteristics that are fashionable or legitimate during the period in which they were founded. Intrinsic features also relate to theorists who have documented how public organizations reinvent their original missions and tailor their appearance to placate and please external stakeholders (Boin et al. 2010, 402).

One important issue in this regard concerns the institutional design of membership rules (Koremenos et al. 2001, 763). Membership in IOs is usually distinguished as either universal or restricted (Rittberger et al. 2012, 7–9; Jacobson 1984, 12). Thus, it can be assumed that IOs that are potentially open to all states feature different discursive patterns than IOs with restricted membership. Moreover, if an IO has many different member states with different interests and preferences, this heterogeneity makes it more diffcult to fnd a commonly accepted framing of an issue at stake. On the other hand, once the frame is set, its moral authority is high.

Another important aspect regarding the institutional design of IOs is the scope of issues covered (Koremenos et al. 2001). In IO research, two notions are commonly distinguished, namely comprehensive and policyspecifc concerns of IOs (Lenz et al. 2015). IOs with comprehensive scopes deal with more issue areas than those with specifc policy concerns. Hence, comprehensive IOs could link issues of social policy with other topics in their portfolio, for instance economics or the environment. IOs with more than one policy feld usually have to fnd an overarching world view which is implicitly refected in the IO's discursive approach in all policy felds it is dealing with.

Understanding IOs (and particularly IO secretariats) as complex bureaucracies entails some important implications for the discourse characteristics of IOs. As has been shown, the analysis of IOs as bureaucracies must also take into consideration the internal IO procedures, rules, and mechanisms (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). These infuence how fexible an IO is in terms of dealing with changing external situations. In the context of studying the discourses of IOs in social policy, this means that the organization of IO bureaucracies infuences how the discursive culture of IOs is institutionally constituted. These factors provide a framework for deliberations within IOs and shape the scope of discussions.

## Discourses of IOs: Cognitive Authority and Soft Governance

As a second step, we are interested in the discourses which take place within and between IOs in different social policy felds. The organizational environment, characterized by the degree of density, diversity, and interaction between IOs as well as the institutional design of an IO, which includes its scope of membership and the structure of its bureaucracy, provide an analytical framework for analyzing how IOs are infuenced by each other in terms of what they can do and how they can interact. However, the analysis of their discourses provides insights on what ideas, policies, and leitmotifs they promote both regionally and globally in their feld about a particular social policy. This allows us to assess how their views on social policies have evolved and whether we can observe isomorphic tendencies regarding ideas.

The importance of discourses from an International Relations' point of view is usually associated with social constructivism, as it offers explanatory strength in assessing IO governance capabilities. Discourses, in this sense, are understood in this volume as strategical discourse promoted by individual or collective actors, and not as structural components which constrain activity. Central to this perspective is the role of IOs and their ability to gain autonomy and authority as actors. Often equipped to set agendas, prepare and shape decisions, or foster implementation, IOs are thus more than the sum of their member states' interests (Koremenos et al. 2001).

In particular, in a highly complex feld where knowledge is considered a key resource, IOs make themselves irreplaceable in terms of providing information to their members that is otherwise not available (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, Martens and Jakobi 2010b). In the absence of command and control, IOs can make use of their ability to produce information and knowledge to generate infuence (Conzelmann 2008, 44). Unlike hard or coercive mechanisms of governance, such soft governance cannot be equated with traditional hierarchical steering, but rather with epistemic knowledge (Haas 1992). What is important in this line of thought is that IOs need to be accepted as cognitive authorities on discursive governance and discursively provide a set of coherent ideas for policy solutions.

#### *Cognitive Authority: Legitimacy and Reputation of IOs*

IO soft governance implies that although IOs are set up by states and consist of state delegates, they are able to develop their own preferences and ideas because of intra-organizational networks and interactions that cannot be fully controlled by any principals (Hawkins et al. 2006). Despite the provision of a clear mandate on how to act, IOs can go beyond their previously defned roles and generate new aims that exceed their initial purpose and scope. With time, IOs may even embrace policy positions that are at odds with the interest of their founders, thereby exerting infuence back onto their member states and beyond, given the potential for agency slack (Koenig-Archibugi 2006). This may be accomplished when IOs, or more specifcally their bodies (e.g. secretariats, departments, and working groups), develop idiosyncratic discourses and generate their own ways of framing an issue. Instead of simply carrying out what their member states urge them to do, IOs become policy entrepreneurs.

In this context, an IO needs to be accepted as a *cognitive authority* in the given policy feld (Broome and Seabrooke 2012, 2015) in order to shape a given discourse. The authority of an actor lacking coercive powers is strongly linked to the aspect of legitimacy. An indicator of an IO's legitimacy is its reputation. IOs with a 'good' reputation (i.e. a reputation for being rational and impartial) are accepted as legitimate sources of advice largely due to the fact that they exhibit apolitical and technocratic expertise (Barnett 2002, 113; Sharman 2007; Meyer and Rowan 1977). The perceived legitimacy of an IO leads others to follow its recommendations.

The ability to shape how to think about something is central in understanding soft governance by discursive means. Since IOs utilizing soft governance rely on their function as advisors and opinion leaders, one key element is the role and dissemination of ideas. The central argument in this respect is that the proliferation of ideas and ideational change in turn promote policy change. Ideas serve as a cognitive framework for interpreting an issue, identifying something as a problem, and rendering suitable solution strategies (Martens and Jakobi 2010a). Thus, both the social creation of common knowledge as a standard in a policy feld and the role of IOs in shaping international discourse are essential for soft governance (Abbott and Snidal 1998). In the case of social policies, this means that ideas IOs create and promote about social policies serve as "cognitive flters through which actors come to […] conceive of their own interests" (Hay 2011, 69).

This takes place in a discursive process. First, ideas shape the defnition of an issue as a problem. In this regard, the reinterpretation of a policy in the light of a new idea reveals that something needs to be changed. This means that IOs frst create common shared knowledge by providing information which was otherwise not accessible. The collected data is then interpreted against the background of views and ideas within the IO. Pure information is transformed into substantial knowledge (Barnett and Finnemore 2004).

Second, by identifying something as problematic, ideas can also indicate goals (i.e. a more desirable policy). The SDGs are a current and prominent example. They address global challenges in various social policy felds, interconnect them, and defne targets to be achieved. It is deemed essential to back arguments with empirical evidence, as they must be proved to be conclusive and sound.

Third, suitable means for accomplishing the new goals are communicated through ideas. This "meditative mode" of soft IO governance addresses direct contributions to the policy discourse (Mahon and McBride 2008). IOs make recommendations to their members on the basis of publicized information and fndings about best practices in a certain policy feld and consequently lobby for them (Martens and Jakobi 2010a). This lobbying can take different forms, such as recommendations which illustrate directly how to act in a policy feld, for instance. More indirectly, recommendations can also emphasize the behavior of a peer actor in order to serve as a blueprint.

#### *Soft Governance: IOs as Broadcasters of Ideas and Policies*

Ideas are not just tools in the hands of strategic actors (Lieberman 2002, 699), they need agents to be disseminated in a discursive process. IOs act as these disseminators or broadcasters of ideas (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, 17) and aim to "nurture people's identities, helping them to construct their fundamental values which, in turn, shapes their beliefs and interests" (Béland and Cox 2011, 9). IOs help to defne what stakeholders want and provide them with the justifcation for why they want something.

By discursively constraining the frame of appropriate behavior, IOs are able to infuence others, be it national governments or other actors in the international sphere, because they possess the authority to create social reality (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 2005). IOs aim to frame a common understanding of the issue at stake and defne goals for policymaking by increasing or decreasing the legitimacy of a certain norm, policy, or action (Nay 2014).

Interesting questions in this regard are about whether the nature of the discourse is normatively constituted or whether it focus on strategic behavior and technical aspects. Who is participating in these discourses? Can we observe different discursive frames competing within single IOs or between IOs? Why does one prevail? Or do different IOs within a social policy feld hold different discursive frames and compete with each other?

By virtue of the promoted leitmotifs or guiding principles, IOs can set how the discourse of a topic is defned, shaped, and promoted. IOs set standards against which national policies can be evaluated and create normative pressures for the national context of policymaking (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). They form opinions which stimulate and inspire national discourses in politics, the public, and in the media. In other words, shaping discourses is a form of soft governance.

#### Structure of the Book

Taken together, this volume seeks to fll a major gap on IO social governance. The chapters in this book have *two purposes*. On the one hand, they shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs. They explore how a particular social policy feld is constituted and which major or dominant IOs are setting the trends. On the other hand, the contributions examine the *discourses* these IOs promote in 'their' feld by exploring and analyzing the ideas and leitmotifs they produce. By exploring the trajectories IOs set and spread, the chapters in this book provide novel knowledge about the architecture of arguments in global social governance. In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the volume contains three parts and each part contains four chapters.

This introduction provides a systematic theoretical approach to examining IOs in global social policy. It lays out in broad strokes the knowledge about their purposes, functions, and characteristics in general, and their involvement in social policy issues in particular. Complementing liberal and constructivist IR theories, the introduction lays out organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for the analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance.

Part II deals with *labor and migration* issues. The following Chap. 2 by *Fergusson* addresses the ways IOs have responded to youth unemployment as an important and distinctive policy feld by tracing the historical context of multiple IOs' engagements. It also gives particular attention to the evolving relationship between the ILO and the World Bank as well as their construction of, and withdrawal from, partnerships that variously facilitated and limited the pursuit of their respective strategies and goals for alleviating youth unemployment. By analyzing the policy discourses of both IOs, it fnds externally facing partnerships were established as they better refect distinctive ILO and World Bank priorities. In Chap. 3, *Römer*, *Henninger*, and *Dung* compare how three international and two regional organizations, namely the ILO, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), approach the global governance of labor standards. They argue that two main discourses have been pursued in the global debate, a 'social' discourse, and a 'neoliberal' discourse, and they fnd that IOs whose intrinsic features allow for an institutionalized representation of workers' interests pursue variations of the social discourse, whereas those that do not stay closer to a neoliberal position. Furthermore, they show that the coexistence of these two conficting discourses has led to contestation, but also to exchange and cooperation. In Chap. 4, *Yeates* and *Pillinger* offer a historical development of health care worker migration as a global social policy feld in which distinct felds of care and migration overlap. They emphasize the pluralistic and dynamic nature of the feld, and the role of contestation, cooperation, and coordination in the unfolding of global policy in order to better understand the origins of this feld and its key characteristics. Chapter 5 on the global social governance of pensions by *Heneghan* analyzes the way in which IOs have competed to shape the pensions discourse. It shows how the organizational feld has been shaped by the dominant economic paradigm, which has created space for IOs to operate in the policy area. It also fnds that the intrinsic features of each IO active in the pension reform arena determine its approach to infuencing the pensions discourse and its response to rivals entering the feld.

Part III deals with issues concerning *family and education*. Chapter 6 by *Holzscheiter* traces the history of children's rights as a distinct sphere in international law from the frst recognition of the special status of children, to adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to the growth of the contemporary complex IO landscape. Children's rights enjoy growing visibility and relevance, and continue to be a cross-cutting issue in international organizations of all kinds, making them a central dimension of global social governance; nonetheless international norms and measures surrounding children's rights continue to be challenged and questioned by scholars and practitioners alike. This contestation is also refected in the discourse within the population of IOs. In Chap. 7, *Niemann* and *Martens* map the population of education IOs to describe what types of IOs deal with education and to identify different clusters of IOs. Moreover, the ideas IOs hold regarding education are analyzed and show how the discourse on education has developed over time within the population of IOs. They show that IOs' ideas about the purpose of education converged over time and that IOs became more holistic with regard to the leitmotifs they hold. In Chap. 8, *Mahon* identifes that from the 1990s to 2008, the family policy feld was bifurcated between the North and the South, whereby the former followed the shift from the male breadwinner to the adult earner family with its work-family tensions as promoted by the ILO and the OECD, and the latter focused on policies targeting children in poor families and had UNICEF and the World Bank clearly playing an important role on the ground. Since the 2008 crisis, the feld has come together through the Sustainable Development Goals which simultaneously address both North and South. Chapter 9 by *Schuster* and *Kolleck* deals with disability as a global social policy issue since the shift in conceptualization from a medical to a social perspective. It identifes infuential actors, relates them to the main discourses, and maps their relations by using network analysis.

Part IV deals with *health and environment*. In Chap. 10, *Kaasch* focuses on four key IOs involved in global social policy in the feld of health care systems. She traces their roles and relationships over time and argues that the architecture has been increasingly characterized by collaboration around key concepts such as Universal Health Coverage (UHC). In the current COVID-19 response, however, preliminary fndings suggest a shift back to original mandates. In Chap. 11, *Lakeman* deals with climate change as a global social challenge. The chapter highlights the temporal shift toward the current understanding of climate change as a pervasive threat to social policy writ large at the IO level across various issue areas. Climate change as a compounding issue has led to compelling developments regarding the roles of IOs as actors of soft governance, which this chapter illustrates via the example of climate insurance. In Chap. 12, *Schmidt* looks at water as a feld of global social policy concern. The chapter provides the historical context for understanding how international organizations developed a distinctly global orientation to water policy alongside the emergence of global hydrology. Water security is now central to how international organizations frame and respond to risks affecting interconnected environmental and economic systems. In Chap. 13, *Wolkenhauer* examines the policies of IOs in the Governance of Food. Despite having been on the global (social) policy agenda since the beginning of the previous century, hunger and undernourishment have not been resolved to this day. The chapter traces discursive and institutional shifts and shows how, after an initial focus on smallholder agriculture, IOs' focus shifted from production to consumption. Coupled with an overly optimistic trust in the market, they have thus been as much part of the problem as they might still become part of the solution.

The concluding Chap. 14 by *Martens*, *Niemann*, and *Kaasch* resumes the arguments made in the introduction to this volume. It summarizes the empirical fndings of the individual contributions and highlights prevailing cross-cutting issues and themes. Overall, it becomes evident that IOs have been part of the architecture of arguments in global social governance for a long time: They have been populating diverse social felds in which they more often cooperate or coexist in issue-related or individual regional niches than contest each other. IOs have also proven strong in exercising soft governance as the broadcasters of new ideas, having cognitive authority over their specifc feld. The chapter closes by formulating avenues for further research.

#### References


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# Labor and Migration

# International Organizations' Involvement in Youth Unemployment as a Global Policy Field, and the Global Financial Crisis

### *Ross Fergusson*

#### Introduction

Youth employment and unemployment are only recently becoming recognized as a distinctive feld of global and transnational policy. In the last two decades, several key texts have greatly deepened our understanding of International Organizations' (IOs) centrality to the governance of global social policy (notably Deacon 1997, 2007; Deacon et al. 2003; O'Brien 2014; Yeates 2000, 2014; Kaasch and Martens 2015). While all address labor or employment policy, in comparison there has been little or no analysis of global social policy actors' engagement with unemployment in relation to young people— predominantly the most vulnerable unemployment demographic in recently transformed labor markets. General interest in this policy feld burgeoned in the years following the Global Financial

R. Fergusson (\*)

Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

e-mail: ross.fergusson@open.ac.uk

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 31

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_2

Crisis (GFC), but it has lacked the analytical and scholarly attention to global policy afforded to other felds represented in this volume.1 As a result, understanding of how the global governance of youth (un)employment has evolved and functioned as a policy feld remains comparatively limited.

This oversight could not be attributed to the short histories of IOs' activities. By far the most prominent IO in the feld, the International Labour Organization (ILO) recently celebrated the centennial of its establishment under the Covenant of the League of Nations, set up by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to address the aftermath of World War I. The ILO's founding remit included labor relations and supply, the prevention of unemployment and other identifed concerns including the protection of young people, children and women in labor markets. The only other IO of comparable historical standing, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now referred to as the World Bank (WB), was also part of an international response to catastrophic global social confict—established as one of the Bretton Woods institutions of 1944 to prevent the recurrence of major uneven development as a widely recognized cause of World War II.

Despite the longevity and global reach and scale of the ILO and the IBRD/WB, their work and that of the many other IOs and the international partnerships they have initiated, it is only recently that youth unemployment (YU) is becoming collectively interpreted and analyzed as a distinctive global policy feld. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it was the rapid spread of mass YU in many countries at unprecedented levels during and after the GFC that prompted international recognition of the fact that YU is a global issue and a global policy feld worthy of globalist modes of analysis—most notably because of its intergenerational signifcance and its impacts on international labor migration and international tensions (Fergusson and Yeates 2014).

To set the contemporary context of these developments, some 'headline' data is necessary.2 Most recently, 'headcounts' of unemployed young people aged 15–24 years recorded by the ILO have been consistently

2Unless otherwise stated, all YU data hereafter is drawn from ILO data to 2018 (https:// www.ilo.org/wesodata).

<sup>1</sup>Eichhorst and Rinne (2015), for example, estimate that by 2014, 730 youth employment projects were under way in 110 countries, initiated by IOs and the international development programs of advanced economies.

between 11% and 12% (1999–2019) of the labor force, peaking at 77 million worldwide in 2009, falling back to 70 million in 2015, and then rising slightly but steadily to a projected 71 million in 2018. These data are undoubtedly signifcant under-counts.3 Numerically, 71% of the young people who were unemployed at the peak level in 2009 were male, 29% were female. In addition, if the category 'unemployed' is expanded to include all young people aged 15–24 years who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), this more inclusive defnition of nonparticipation in labor markets rises to 22%. Some data suggest that actual levels of 'registered' plus undeclared non-participation probably take the total of young people who are NEET to 130 million. If in-work poverty is included, 40% of under-25s worldwide are workless or poor (UN-ECOSOC 2016).

Rates of unemployment vary dramatically between countries and between regions. The weighted 27-year average YU rates to 2017 range between less than 5% (in ten African and Asian countries) and more than 40% (fve African and three European countries). In Northern Africa, YU rates have fuctuated in the 25–35% range since 1991; in Eastern Europe the range is 15–25%; in Central and Western Asia 13–20%; in Latin America and the Caribbean 10–20%. Almost all regions have seen signifcant increases in these rates toward the upper range since the onset of the GFC. In South-East Asia and the Pacifc fve young people are unemployed for every unemployed adult.4

At these scales, for any age-range, persistently high unemployment at any spatial level cannot be construed as an economic policy problem alone: for young people, it is an acute problem for *social* policy. The dependency of many teenagers on their parents and other adults, the vulnerability of all young people to multiple forms of exploitation, and the harms and risks of extended periods of exclusion from labor markets and economic participation are all at high risk of becoming realized as problems of and for social policy that span multiple sectors (education, health, housing, social security) and require 'whole-society' approaches for their resolution.

Wherever possible, this chapter focuses on statutory instruments using the governance capacities of IOs. In view of the multiplicity of actors, the

<sup>3</sup> See Bardhan (1978) and Beneria (1981) on the longstanding challenges of estimating unemployment levels.

<sup>4</sup>Fergusson and Yeates (2021) provide a full analysis of the depth, extent and distribution of endemic YU.

ILO's longevity as an IO, and the many forms taken by other transnational and global actors, it is necessary to concentrate analysis throughout the chapter on the ILO and WB as the two key IO actors and on the partnerships they established. Particular attention is given to the various formations these IOs constitute, and the trajectories, confgurations and processes which the evolution of their partnerships has entailed. This focus emphasizes the coexistence and contestation of the ILO and WB, and the modes of mutual engagement, cooperation and collaboration between them.

As Niemann et al. (see introduction to this volume) argue, individual IOs function in contexts of coexistence, mutual recognition, cooperation, exchange, collaboration, but also in contexts of competition, contestation, struggle and confict. The overarching predominance of the ILO and the WB and their partnerships epitomize these forms of coexistence. These themes should not be construed either as typical or as defning the landscape of IO actor participation in framing and embedding social policy across this feld. Rather, what follows is intended to extend and diversify understanding of the forms of global social governance analyzed in this volume.

# Mapping the IO 'Population' and Discourses

Six key IOs populate this policy feld. They are signifcantly differentiated by the depth, extent and timeframes of their involvement. Perhaps predictably, the history of their engagement is a strong indicator of IOs' respective signifcances as effective actors: Table 2.1 indicates their infuence on YU policy globally, as well as their year of frst intervention.

#### *Dominant Actors: The Policy Discourses of the ILO and World Bank*

The ILO and WB have jointly established themselves as transnational authorities setting principles and standards and diffusing rules, norms and key resources in the policy feld of youth (un)employment. As normentrepreneurs, in very different ways, they have identifed, defned and constituted YU as a policy feld, a social problem (ILO) and an economic problem (WB), assuming leading roles in producing information. Their policy discourses establish the prevailing normative and ideational


**Table 2.1** IOs in the youth unemployment policy feld: earliest interventions

foundations of the feld, and the ILO's and WB's status as leading 'soft governance' actors.

As well as being by far the longest-standing IO, the ILO has had the most extensive engagement with youth employment and unemployment. Established in 1919 with a constitution committed to international social justice and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969, the ILO stands as an IO of unrivaled stature in the setting of international labor standards and promoting employment rights. Many of its Conventions and Recommendations bear directly on these issues with respect to YU. The ILO's interventions across the range of conventions with statutory powers, recommendations, local projects and an extensive presence on the ground across several world regions make it the pre-eminent IO globally in the feld of (un)employment. The ILO works closely and interactively with other UN bodies and civil society organizations, national governments and in partnerships.

From its inception, the ILO's discourse was focused on the need for concerted action to address the international causes of unemployment. Early work set out international norms governing young people's relationship to work and education by means of Conventions and Recommendations. Between 1919 and 2002, 48 such instruments relating to children/young people and work were crucial to the construction of this transnational policy feld. For example, key instruments concerning YU during the interwar period ensured conditional fnancial support to the involuntarily unemployed, disputed economic theory that advocated wage reductions as a means of remedying unemployment, and stipulated compulsory general and vocational educational provision for all up to the age of 18. Many instruments have since been updated.

Since 2000, the ILO's YU policy discourse has been shaped by its Decent Work and Global Employment agendas. It has emphasized securing increases in aggregate demand for young people's labor, including by means of job creation and institutional labor market reforms, but has also advocated active labor market policies (ALMPs), selective employment incentives and supply-side labor market measures. The ILO's commitment to unemployment-related welfare benefts for young people is embedded in its discourse of 'social protection foors' that include basic income security across the life cycle. In the wake of the GFC, ILO discourse has urged member states to increase demand for young people's labor in response to 'jobless growth' and inadequate unemployment protection, while also developing more business-friendly discourses, including partnership-based entrepreneurial solutions. ILO discourses in this policy feld have recently manifested increasing tensions, reconfguring its labor market analyses and unemployment policies to concede to some neoliberal agendas, while continuing to reassert its historical commitments to international social protection and labor standards.5

In parallel with the ILO's post-WWII initiatives, the UN and IBRD were active in this feld. A key UN report cites the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights' commitment to "the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment" (Article 23). The Charter of the UN pursued the threefold UN goal for "higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development"

<sup>5</sup> See Fergusson and Yeates (2013, 2014) for detailed analyses of the policy discourses of all IOs reviewed here.

(Article 55). The UN also called upon the IBRD to borrow from and lend to governments to facilitate full employment. While this remit drove a signifcant element of IBRD discourse throughout the following decades, its focus did not specifcally include youth employment until the WB responded to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000. In collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the ILO, the WB set up the Youth Employment Network (YEN) at the 2000 Millennium Summit. The WB's frst leading intervention on YU followed several years later, instigating the Global Partnership for Youth Employment (GPYE) in 2008.

During the pre-GFC period the WB's interventions were largely confned to published policy positions, the discourses of which emphasized young people's insuffcient or ill-matched labor market skills as a signifcant cause of YU. These discourses provided the rationale for the WB's criticism of regulated wages for young people, observing that YU rates are lowest in low-income countries, and implicitly associating this with minimal or absent minimum wage rates for young people in such economies. WB discourse also tended to attribute endemic high rates of YU to demographic bulges such that young people who could not be accommodated in labor markets should be assigned to extended schooling or vocational training.6

Two related themes connect these discourses. They are grounded in human capital theory, and all focus on supply-side interpretations of high levels of YU. As a result, WB policy advocacy has leaned strongly toward more effective job-search training, internships and measures to 'smooth' transitions into youth labor markets. However, as evidence accumulated of the prolonged effects of the GFC on YU rates (especially in Northern Africa, and also in parts of Europe in 2012–15), WB discourse adjusted, beginning with growing recognition of the damage to human development of mass YU, its costs and its effects on public perceptions of (in) equality and social justice. The WB's recognition of multiple shortcomings of YU programs that focused on the supply-side 'defciencies' of young labor market entrants followed. Further awareness of the high socio-economic risks of endemic mass YU (especially in politically volatile regions) intensifed WB policy shifts. In parallel, the WB's earlier antiwelfare discourses abated and prompted the need to reconsider the

<sup>6</sup> See World Bank (2006, 2011, 2012); Fergusson and Yeates (2013). For a defnition of endemic YU see Fergusson and Yeates (2021).

boundaries of welfare, causing recognition of the need for conditional support to gain ground.7

The WB's shifts in its analyses and prognoses coincided with corresponding obverse shifts in the ILO's positions, as noted above, toward some degree of convergence—thereby apparently creating the conditions for more effective dialogue and collaboration between them (see below).

#### *Other Signifcant Actors: UNESCO's and OECD's Policy Discourses*

From the earliest years of the UN, the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) maintained an important role in shaping YU discourse as inseparable from issues of educational participation. UNESCO worked closely with the ILO and IBRD on child labor, statutory age of admission to employment and compulsory education enforcement plans (UNESCO 1951, annex II: 17). A powerful, socially progressive, discursive dynamic between UNESCO and the ILO maintained strong pro-schooling advocacy, whereby the case for reducing YU became bound to the case for raising the school-leaving age. Before the GFC, UNESCO discourse stressed the particular exposure of young people to the risks of economic globalization, insecure jobs, involuntarily delayed labor market entry and prolonged unemployment/underemployment (UNESCO 2004, 5). Since the GFC it has led EU-funded programs in Mediterranean Northern Africa and Western Asia. Throughout, UNESCO discourse stressed unreliable and intermittent demand for young people's labor and avoided discourses that allege poor skills and capabilities as causes of YU.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been continuously active in this policy feld. Its annual *Employment Outlook* Reports consistently address YU through in-depth multi-country strategic analyses of YU which provide extensive survey data and intensive analysis of policy effectiveness (OECD 2004–11)*.* OECD discourses were consonant with those of the WB. They were informed by human capital theory and focused on labor market supplyside defciencies and the reportedly ill-adapted skills of school-leavers and disincentivizing welfare programs. The GFC bore especially heavily on almost all OECD member states, triggering adjustments to OECD

<sup>7</sup> See World Bank (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).

discourse. Defcient demand for young workers became temporarily recognized as a key driver of escalating YU, and advocacy of welfare 'safety nets' for previously ineligible younger age-groups with little or no access to unemployment benefts strengthened (OECD 2010a, b, 2011a, b). Gradually, however, as continuing high YU rates were apparently becoming normalized, OECD discourse returned to young people's alleged skills defcits and the fscally detrimental effects of subsistence-suffcient welfare benefts (OECD 2012–15). The OECD's policy discourses on YU were unusually fexible over time, while also consistently defaulting to archetypal neoliberal positions, interspersed with sporadic more social democratic leanings.

#### *Recent Entrants: UNICEF's and IMF's Policy Discourses*

Two less prominent IOs warrant recognition here. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund's (UNICEF) statutory focus remains on the welfare of children and young people up to age 18 under the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and on fghting child labor wherever appropriate. Over the long run its principal trajectory of engagement with young people's employment has been to promote and facilitate skills-related and employability programs in lower-income countries, typifed by its current Generation Unlimited project supporting young people and extending its upper age-range to 24 (UNICEF 2005, 2010).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was a late entrant to the feld. Its interventions followed escalating YU rates during the GFC. Unprecedently, the IMF's Managing Director shared public international platforms with the Director-General of the ILO, promoting discourses of social protection and labor market intervention, identifying unemployment insurance for young people as cost-effective for sustaining consumer demand, and advocating job subsidies to avoid redundancies.8

Neither UNICEF nor the IMF claim signifcance as defning discursive actors in this feld. They are nonetheless shapers of discourses and norm-entrepreneurs in other felds, and their counter-stereotypical policy positions on YU are surprising. As a leading UN program, unaccountably, UNICEF seems to overlook the well-being of young people

<sup>8</sup>These events took place at major international conferences in Oslo (2010) and Vienna (2011).

aged 15+ and the threats to their economic and social security. Conversely, as a key Bretton Woods IO, the IMF has displayed unexpected concern for this age-group, advocating extension of social protection and job creation in the wake of the GFC and allocating major fnancial support to mitigate extremely high levels of YU in Northern Africa (although this appears not to be a continuous programmed intervention).

The policy discourses of these two least-infuential IOs do not align well with the pro-social predispositions of UN bodies, or the pro-business predispositions of the WB and OECD. This provides a salutary reminder that the discourses and priorities of UNESCO and the OECD in this feld cannot be 'read off' from their other more prominent discourses in other policy felds. It also demonstrates an ebb and fow of policy ideas and norms within IOs, which indicates ephemeral context-specifc pragmatic adaptation at one extreme, or deep-rooted internal dissent at another. It is therefore salutary throughout to recall Niemann et al.'s comment (see introduction to this volume) that IOs are not monolithic discursive actors, but complex bureaucracies that experience and contain ongoing multiple sources of contestation within their organizations.

# Partnerships and IOs: Disseminating Knowledge, Ideas and Discourses

The most immediate recipients of IOs' knowledge, ideas and discourses in this policy feld have been the partnerships they construct and shape as deliberate disseminators of norms and policies. It is in and through partnership that IOs have exchanged knowledge and ideas and achieved mutual recognition, sometimes leading to cooperation and collaboration in pooling resources and leveraging partners. Partnership between worldleading IOs with major resources of expertise and fnance and extensive geographical and political reach offers great potential for effective intervention, while also posing considerable risks of dissent and contestation. In practice the only IOs that make continuing direct interventions in the form of specifc employment projects worldwide have been the ILO and WB. Each has its own extensive network of offces worldwide, some of which commission and fund projects in places of perceived signifcant need according to immediate contingencies.9 Many such projects are

<sup>9</sup> In the early 2000s, the ILO already had in place a uniquely extensive global network of up to 60 Country Offces, in Africa (14), Asia/Pacifc (14), Europe and Central Asia (9), and

bespoke and not necessarily part of the strategic international programs that seek to spread the priorities, knowledge and ideas IOs generate and strive to embed in national economic, employment, social and other practices. Most programs take the form of partnerships, and all but one have at least nominally been established as partnerships between the ILO and WB—typically along with one or more additional partners.

It is important to be aware of the political-economic contexts in which such partnerships evolved. Unsurprisingly, given their historical purposes, remits and priorities, the ILO and WB have extensive and sometimes contested histories regarding their political, social, and economic positions and contributions. These are captured in an academic literature too extensive to recall here.10 Very briefy summarized, one key marker of their eventual divergence and contestation can be traced back to the 1980s–90s, when the dominance of the Post-WWII UN agencies came under challenge from the Washington Consensus in response to growing international debt and the perceived need for 'structural adjustment' (particularly as a condition of WB/IMF loans), often taking the form of overt politicaleconomic attacks on social democratic values in favor of free-market and neoliberal policies. The changing political economy of global policymaking in this period challenged and partially marginalized the authority of the UN and its constituent organizations, including the ILO and its work in the feld of global (un)employment. The ILO came under strong pressure to accept more fexible employment contracts and relationships, for example. It subsequently responded with a Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which pledged all ILO states to uphold four 'core' labor standards, including the abolition of child labor (reiterated in 2002 through the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (ILO 2004)).11 These initiatives reasserted the ILO's standing as a norm-generating institution—although they did not extend labor rights or strengthen the enforcement of existing labor standards, and they de-emphasized statutory instruments on rights and standards in favor of

representatives in 20 more lead countries in Asia, Middle East, South America, Caribbean, Eastern Europe. The WB has in excess of 100 Country Offces that have much more diverse functions, of which tackling YU is a minor element compared to the ILO's focused network at that time.

<sup>11</sup> https://www.ilo.org/declaration/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020.

<sup>10</sup>For example, Ghébali et al. (1989); Wallerstein (2000); Dale and Robertson (2007); Deacon (2007, 2013, 2015); Standing (2008).

weaker instruments such as recommendations and codes of practice. In return—and as 'ascendant' IOs in the political-economic reconfguration of this period—the WB (and IMF) took steps to 'regularize' their relationship with trade unions (without formalizing them), while continuing to support modes of economic development 'free' from labor regulation.12

These observations set the work of the most politically and fnancially engaged IOs in an altered context. The evolving development of ILO instruments alone graphically depicts its surging capacity as an agent of the global governance of social and labor policy. The great advances occurred in the decades following both World Wars, between 1919 and 1965. The countervailing watershed moment in the YU policy feld was an active retreat from the values of the post-war settlement less than two decades later, making way for the period of unprecedented intensive neoliberalization outlined above, heavily promoted by the WB and IMF. The language and values of the post-war settlement were substantially over-written by IOs that extolled competition, reward of enterprise and the claimed economic and social benefts of deregulated markets in goods, services and labor. While these changes expressed themselves in complex, nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways throughout and beyond the 1980s–90s, they conditioned the practices and ambitions of many IOs and the relations between them—few more so than the ILO and WB, their work in the YU policy feld and their respective mutual propensities to cooperate, coexist, diverge and later eventually to separate and create very different partnerships.

#### *Collaboration, Cooperation, Separation: Endogenous Partnership*

Inter-IO partnerships concerning YU have been a principal means by which IOs in this feld have collaborated formally. The frst of three ILO-WB partnerships in the cause of addressing extreme YU levels was the product of the 2000 Millennium Summit in New York. The YEN which resulted was described as a global platform to prioritize youth employment and exchange policies and programs to improve employment opportunities for youth. YEN was an archetypal semi-endogenous

<sup>12</sup>For example, the WB integrated core labor standards into some of its health-related contracts (see Yeates and Pillinger 2019). More generally, for a fuller account of tensions and advances in ILO-WB relations described here, see Deacon (2015); Fergusson and Yeates (2021).

partnership of two UN IOs (ILO and UNDESA) plus a Bretton Woods institution (WB). It was managed from Geneva by the ILO, from its inception in 2004 onward. In practice, UNDESA's role was principally confned to monitoring and oversight.

The YEN network included development agencies, governments, the private sector, youth groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It had a major presence in 22 lead countries including a special focus on Africa, and programs in Asia, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.13 The ILO's Lead Country Network collected data and prepared and implemented National Action Plans, focusing on employability, entrepreneurship, employment creation and equal opportunities. Direct fnancial support was confned to impact evaluations and small-scale entrepreneurship projects in Africa.

YEN prioritized awareness-raising, advocacy and capacity-building for youth organizations. It laid the groundwork for increased intergovernmental recognition that youth employment would be essential for meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Its most signifcant distinguishing feature was its attempt to redefne youth employment as a social development issue, rather than a labor issue. It also allowed the two leading IOs to operate and negotiate on an altered terrain that minimized the prominence of the contested elements of their non-aligned politicaleconomic positions, and to level-out their unequal strengths and powers. In practice, it was clear from the early years that YEN was shaped and defned in character with the ILO's longstanding priorities, and largely faithful to its predominant discourses. WB infuence on the framing and conduct of the local projects was palpably secondary: the ILO emerged as the appropriate leading player, given its employment-focused network and its ability to work on the ground in some of the most challenging economic and political YU environments. Its pre-eminent 'street-level' reach in such contexts made it best-placed to identify the geographies of priority, based on trustworthy data and local networking with governments and pre-existing embedded programs and organizations.

An independent evaluation in the closing years of the YEN partnership reported that:

<sup>13</sup> In the early stage of its establishment, YEN was fnanced by a desultory cluster of national government bodies (Denmark, Sweden, UK), the International Olympic Committee and ACCENTURE PLC as well as the ILO, WB and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

YEN is said to have shifted course in a way that fts well with [World] Bank priorities, and as a grantee of its Global Partnership for Youth Employment (GPYE) [see below] it is seen as a good catalyst. ILO has perhaps the closest but most complex relationship with YEN, whilst UNDESA works less closely with the YEN Secretariat than the other partners, and describes its contribution as 'minimal'. (International Labour Offce Evaluation Unit 2012, 4)

It is a signifcant and telling feature of this analysis of the work of leading IOs in this policy feld that the inter-institutional and intra-institutional politics between IOs are opaque to 'remote' researchers. The closest it is possible to get to this politics is to interpret the outputs of nominally independent bodies like the ILO's Evaluation Unit. Only original primary research could provide confdent insights into the closed relations within partnerships of this kind. Only tenuous deduction is therefore possible. Nonetheless, the Evaluations Unit's observation (triangulated with multiple other minor and contingent secondary indicators) strongly suggests an unequal division of labor in YEN, and some early 'sharing out' of control, as between a dominant and subordinate IO. The very conception of YEN was, self-evidently, not an untested ab initio venture, but an accretion of a wider and more ambitious structure that built on a longstanding pre-existing organizational framework—namely the ILO Lead Country Network, which was part of the ILO's employment-related work and other work in an extensive network (described above). It was this network that enabled YEN to begin new work in multiple localities barely three years after the MDGs were ratifed.

The inherent dominance of the ILO in all practical aspects of managing YEN cannot reasonably be imagined as anything less than a superior degree of power, compared to that of the WB within the partnership. It is therefore less than remarkable that, in 2008, the WB instigated its GPYE, nominally incorporating YEN as one partner alongside the Arab Urban Development Institute (a not-for-proft NGO), the International Youth Foundation (IYF) (an international charitable organization) and Understanding Children's Work (an inter-agency UN body).14 The partnership focused on providing applied research and learning to better

<sup>14</sup> See ILO 2012, International Labour Conference 101st session, Committee on Youth Employment (C.E.J./D. 186). https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/%2D%2Ded\_norm/%2D%2D-relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms\_182840.pdf. Accessed March 21, 2020.

understand school-to-work transitions and increase the employability of youth, promoting policy dialogue and supporting technical assistance for local governments and capacity-building for stakeholders from the public sector and civil society, to enhance their engagement—priorities that are entirely consistent with many of the WB's discourses as described above, and inconsistent with the ILO's founding discourses.

YEN's inclusion in GPYE maintained a de facto ILO presence in the partnership, for the duration of GPYE's short life. Much as the WB's early creation of GPYE gave the appearance of a successful 'take-over' bid when it 'incorporated' YEN, YEN's focus nevertheless changed under (largely direct) ILO leadership from Geneva, taking on more strategic activities through its Lead Country Network, including running YEN Networks, the youth-to-youth toolkit and monitoring and evaluation activities (ILO Evaluation Offce 2018). The YEN Secretariat ceased to function in 2014 when GPYE also ceased to operate (although YEN continues as a 'brand' in ILO projects).15

YEN and GPYE constituted the decade of endogenous partnership between the pre-eminent IOs in this policy feld. In all, YEN and GPYE had almost coterminous lifespans. The pressure for the ILO and WB to cooperate directly coincided with the 2001 Millennium Summit and ended in 2014. Initially, these previously often-counterposed IOs made common cause. Full cooperation in the YEN partnership nevertheless lasted little more than four years. As in all two-way partnerships (accepting that UNDESA/the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) were key actors only as sources of monitoring, oversight and funding), full and effective coordination depends on a single locus of governance and administration. This was initially acceded to ILO and its Geneva Offces. Primary research would be needed to provide empirical clarity about the early separation of these two dominant actors. But whatever the measures taken to ensure the WB's due infuence, they were selfevidently insuffcient to meet its preferences and priorities for addressing mass YU. The ILO's priorities at this time, shaped by its Global Employment Agenda, afforded strong emphasis to increasing aggregate demand for young people's labor, including by means of job creation and institutional labor market reforms, while also acknowledging some need

<sup>15</sup>By 2014, GPYE had been devolved to the IYF, which produced just two outputs. GPYE has since ceased to function. https://www.iyfnet.org/initiatives/global-partnership-youthemployment-gpye. Accessed February 25, 2020.

for ALMPs. The WB's corresponding priorities are best encapsulated in its Social Protection and Labor (SPL) strategy (itself committed to ALMPs) and building labor market resilience in young people (WB 2011). This approach epitomizes a supply-side emphasis in addressing the challenges of mass YU. These contrasting demand-side/supply-side emphases in YU policy also epitomize the tensions that came to underlie the strategic commitments of the ILO and WB through YEN and GPYE.

YEN and GPYE had been established under the shared UN umbrella of the MDGs: MDG1 included a commitment to full employment and decent work for young people. Complete severance of relations between these two leading would-be IO partners would therefore have been politically untenable. YEN continued to exist, nominally embedded within GPYE. This shifted the locus of power and funding from Geneva to Washington. However successfully the shift was mitigated by the ILO's continuing responsibility for YEN embedded within GPYE, the watershed from cooperation to coexistence *en route* to the separation of the ILO and WB had been crossed. Perhaps the most symbolic and informative aspects of this watershed lay in the ILO's continuing commitments to working in and through its Lead Country Networks using ILO on-the-ground infrastructure in lower-income countries, on one side of the dissolving partnership; and in the WB's enthusiasm for working with NGOs and Third Sector transnational organizations, on the other. Somewhat resonant of the distinctions between public/state versus Third Sector funding, this divergence set the stage for the next decade (and beyond) in this policy feld. It was a divergence that would be based wholly on exogenous partnership and, eventually, effective separation between the lead IO partners.

#### *Coexistence, Contestation, Division: Exogenous Partnership*

GPYE was replaced by an infnitely more ambitious and very different partnership wholly led by the WB: Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE). It is a multi-stakeholder partnership that was planned to begin in 2012, launched in 2014 and became operational in 2015. Its high ambition to see 150 million more young people in employment is said to depend on its ability to "catalyse the promotion of public, private, and civil sector innovations".16 To date, the largest of its dozen projects across

<sup>16</sup>World Bank (2015): http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/76591146819 4956530/Solutions-for-youth-employment-strategic-plan-2015-2020. Accessed February 25, 2020.

four continents has funding of just \$250 million and aims to secure employment for 500,000 young people. Described as a coalition, S4YE cultivates multiple and dynamically evolving interlocking partnerships building directly on the WB's affnity for Third Sector partnerships which it pioneered in GPYE, but moving far beyond it to embrace global corporates, and global fnanciers and banks. The nominal connection with the ILO continues in the form of the ILO's membership of S4YE's governing body—ostensibly largely confned to avoiding duplication and mutual conficts of interest in work in the YU feld. Alongside the IYF (itself carried over from GPYE), S4YE's original Third Sector partners include Plan International and Youth Business International (YBI), plus the RAND Corporation and Accenture. Original strategic partners include Hogan Lovells, Rockefeller Foundation, MasterCard and Ernst and Young.17

S4YE's 2015 inaugural Baseline Report commits to increasing the demand for young people's labor. From the outset, supply-side measures dominate three of the four 'Frontier Areas' of its strategic framework (S4YE 2015, 27).18 Only the 'Quality Jobs' frontier area is concerned with demand-side initiatives—generating jobs from private sector actors. No commitment is given to securing rights to social and labor protection.

In conception at least, S4YE anticipated the introduction of the UN's 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG8 prescribes the achievement of "full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities" by 2030.19 SDG Partnerships are expected to include multistakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and fnancial resources.

The ILO's involvement in S4YE appeared marginal from the outset, and this was eventually confrmed by its creation of the 'Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth' (GIDJY)—now the ILO's main contribution to addressing YU at program level. Launched in 2017, GIDJY also contributes to SDG8. It too is a multi-stakeholder partnership, albeit with more modest aims to train fve million young people across 26 projects focused on digital skills, apprenticeships, the rural economy, green jobs,

<sup>17</sup> S4YE has since included several more global corporates, transnational Third Sector agencies and government-funded International Development Agencies among its partners.

<sup>18</sup> https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/23261. Accessed February 25, 2020.

<sup>19</sup> https://indicators.report/targets/8-5/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

entrepreneurship and self-employment, transitions to the formal economy, and work in fragile settings and hazardous occupations (ILO, 2015a, 2015b). Perhaps its most notable feature is that its 'key partners' include 11 UN IOs/agencies and *exclude* the WB. More than any such partnership, GIDJY epitomizes the concept of a constellation of IOs, as much founded in other IOs and other transnational UN agencies as in Third Sector and corporate partnerships.20 It places great stress on decent work, the quality of jobs for young people, promoting human rights, fostering gender equality and strengthening public-private cooperation and coherence. These characteristics sharply mark off GIDJY from S4YE's priorities and methods.

S4YE and GIDJY (now branded as Decent Jobs for Youth (DJY)) are at relatively early stages of development, with limited outcomes to date that could be viewed as commensurate with their ambitions. For the purposes of this analysis at least, more important than their most immediate achievements are their signifcance as unprecedented innovative partnerships which envisage hugely ambitious scope for transforming employment for young people where it is not self-generating under optimum market conditions. But in the present context of understanding the architecture of the arguments and discourses these new partnerships deploy, alongside their implications for the nature of global social governance among leading IOs, their greatest signifcance is already palpable. Both these new exogenous partnerships were products of endogenous partnerships that had aspired to collaboration, cooperation and modes of successful engagement in this policy feld that would be greater than the achievements of the two leading IOs working separately. However, the frst attempt (YEN) lasted for less than four years under its original plans. A somewhat ambiguous, low-profle, half mutually embedded partnership between the ILO and WB (GPYE) endured for approximately six more years (although, as noted, vestiges of YEN remain). The absence of transparency in the functioning of these two IOs prevents empirically sound

20GIDJY's Key Partners are the ILO, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and UNIDO. Also included are multiple other UN agencies (FAO, ITU, UNHCR, UNDP, UNDESA, UNEP, UNFPA), international development agencies and charities (Citi Foundation, EYF, ITC, J-PAL, SCF, UNIAPAC, YBI), some global corporate entities (Microsoft, McDonald's, Nestle, Inter-American Development Bank), international not-for-proft organizations (AISEC, Forge), and some national government aid and ministerial bodies (Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, OIJ).

analyses of the outcomes of YEN and GPYE (notwithstanding the detailed ILO Evaluation Offce reports of 2012 and 2018): both IOs have been almost completely opaque as to the causes of their short-lived attempts at endogenous partnership.

Overlaying this already complex feld of policy actors, in 2018 the UN's Agenda 2030 program and its Youth Strategy introduced Generation Unlimited (GenU), to ensure that every young person is in education, learning, training or employment by 2030 (in pursuit of SDG8).21 As a major global multi-sector partnership, GenU's 53-member Board includes representatives from the ILO, OECD, the European Commission and a multiplicity of UN agencies, private-sector corporate bodies, national governments, Third Sector organizations and other IOs. The World Bank and UNICEF are GenU's key IO actors (already managing a \$1 billion allocation from WB). Interestingly, UNICEF (an historically marginal contributor in this feld) had displayed enthusiasm for supply-side measures, in common with the World Bank, at the start of the GFC.22 Their past shared positions (contrast ILO's and UNESCO's historical demand-side policy leanings) may well have infuenced the UN's decision-making when it constituted this UNICEF-WB alliance. Certainly, the prioritization of supply-side measures is clearly evident in GenU's early on-line outputs.23 The dominant political-economic character of GenU's work 'on the ground' has yet to be revealed. However, the exclusion of the ILO from GenU's Executive, and the preponderance of global private sector and Third Sector corporates on its Board are intrinsically note-worthy (again in contrast to ILO's preference for multiple UN agencies as its key partners in S4YE). Both these observations are consistent with the paths of 'separate development' taken by the World Bank and ILO when they initiated S4YE and DJY. This prompts the question as to why the UN elected to set up a third global partnership alongside them. GenU's commitment to work across public, private and civil society sectors and governments ostensibly replicates a key premise of S4YE's approach. GenU may complement S4YE and DJY—at greatly increased scale if it achieves its ambitions—or duplicate or supersede both partnerships.

<sup>21</sup> https://www.unicef.org/young-people. Accessed June 21, 2020.

<sup>22</sup> See Fergusson and Yeates (2014).

<sup>23</sup> https://www.generationunlimited.org/news-and-stories/world-leaders-unite-education-and-training-young-people. Accessed June 21, 2020.

#### Concluding Comments

As the key historical global actors in this feld, both the ILO and WB have maintained dominant positions, in part by giving attention to opposing policy priorities, by fnding some virtues in each other's dominant and normative discourses and policy logics, and sometimes by cooperating despite discursive differences. Each has endeavored to allow the other's position to stand alongside its own on some key policy dilemmas, without acceding to an opposing policy logic. Nevertheless, a highly condensed summary of their partnerships throws into stark relief the evolving trajectory of ILO-WB relations, as follows. Before the GFC, the ILO and WB coexisted and acted largely in mutual disregard, each identifable more by their differences than by their shared objectives. With the onset of the GFC in 2008, the ILO's YEN was already weakened as a major YU platform and risked being superseded by the WB's GPYE. By 2012–13, GPYE was palpably unequal to making a signifcant impact on the successive waves of burgeoning YU, as the effects of the GFC unfolded internationally. Yet the ILO was then still striving to accommodate the WB's supplyside-dominated priorities, and in 2014 still accepted the role of minor IO partner in the WB's ambitious, radically innovative cross-sector S4YE 'alliance'. Scarcely a year afterward, the ILO was distancing itself from S4YE while remaining on its Board, in order to initiate DJY, and was operating with unprecedented allocations of internal funding for implementation, without assistance from the WB, or by means of a WB presence on its Board.

Across nine years of the most intensive crisis of global YU in recorded history, the leading IOs moved full circle from largely mutually disregarding coexistence, through high-profle collaboration and formal partnership, to effective separation. At the point of separation, the ILO had exceptionally strong country networks and channels of local reach, and the WB retained access to extensive fnancial and other resources.

Understanding whether this cycle of rapid change is faithfully mirrored in both IOs' dominant policy analyses and modes of intervention in labor market and associated welfare policies requires detailed research that can only be achieved effectively by means of 'insider' access. Although much remains to be seen about the functionality and effectiveness of S4YE and DJY, the shift to exogenous partnerships embracing unprecedentedly wide and highly differentiated constellations of Third Sector/corporate partners constitutes a new mode of coexistence between the ILO and WB. This speaks to degrees of historical and recent contestation between them that have resulted in division into two new entities, one of which marks complete separation between the WB and ILO (DJY), the other of which retains only a nominal 'place at the table' for the ILO in a WB-defned universe (S4YE).

What also remains to be established by means of new empirical research is how far this extended history of partnership, division and separation can be attributed to the architecture of the arguments each IO deploys (along with their respective dissenting discourses); and how far it can be attributed to factors that have largely escaped the gaze of scholarship and research in this policy feld. Both IOs are committed to self-evaluation, in terms of program outcomes. But their evaluations cast no light on the politics of cooperation, collaboration, coexistence and contestation between them.

To infer sources of confict and separation from internally managed processes would be risky indeed, however strong the clues and correspondences between sources. It is clear that the balance of power and advantage between the WB and ILO has shifted signifcantly and more than once, in both directions, especially since the WB became fully active in the YU policy feld alongside the ILO. Sometimes these shifts have matched overarching paradigm shifts, like those of the 1980s–90s. How the dynamics of change occurred and were eventually resisted within and between them cannot be 'read off' from their work in any given policy feld. Equally risky would be to attempt to interpret the primary geo-political and political-economic purposes of the work of the ILO and WB from singlefeld-specifc contexts. The major attempts to stimulate engagement in the policy feld of YU in the wake of the GFC also invite skeptical speculation that the principal purposes of the work of the ILO and WB were at that time to allay international concern that burgeoning YU rates posed risks well beyond their impacts on national economies—risks of civil disorder, precipitate youth labor migration, and political tensions and conficts between semi-borderless nations. The need for the international community that funds (and seeks to infuence) the ILO and WB to be 'seen to act' was compelling. Both the MDGs and SDGs placed great emphasis on (and pressures toward) partnership for development. The SDG mandates in particular spurred the efforts of the ILO and WB to act in partnership. Through S4YE and DJY, the WB and ILO nominally meet these expectations while operating separately from one another. The recent advent of GenU, however, may be intended to re-calibrate partnerships and relations between key players, as UNICEF is thrust into the limelight. How such separated *and reconstituted* partnerships operate is largely opaque to the processes of independent evaluation, especially with regard to the evolving relationships between *three* lead IO actors.

Arm's-length scrutiny of complex partnerships involving multiple powerful players rarely manages to deliver insights into internal intra-IO micro-politics. Even studies that gain direct access can be 'called out' on their interpretations. For example, Deacon's ground-breaking work over the last two decades has been unique and pre-eminent in the study of the dynamics of IO relations in the global governance of social policy, especially of the ILO and WB. He found numerous examples of direct dissent and struggle between them in relation to employment, social protection and other policies (Deacon 2007, 2013, 2015). But despite his longstanding, intensive and often frst-hand studies, it would be rash to assume that Deacon's work has defnitively explained ILO-WB dynamics. His methodology has recently been respectfully and tentatively queried for drawing premature conclusions, and for being over-reliant on accounts that reference the personal dimensions of interaction (Cichon 2019). Other policy felds also query the more critical characterizations of the WB, and re-open questions about its political-economic predispositions and stances in the 1980s–90s (see e.g. Barrientos et al. 2011; Alderman and Yemtsov 2012; Abramo et al. 2019).

The debate on the contested subject of inter-IO relations remains far from resolution. Understanding of the effects of IOs' differences, tensions and conficts on policy outcomes also remains limited—just as knowledge of the workings of IOs' interior processes and interactions has remained commensurately limited regarding partnerships. The case for researchers to be afforded direct access to study the dynamics of key inter-IO relations is compelling. What is beyond doubt is that concerted attempts at the global governance of policies intended to alleviate continuous extremes of YU across many world regions have had ostensibly very limited impact to date. The spike in interest among most IOs in the face of the shocking scale of YU immediately after the onset of the GFC has long-since passed. Extreme youth unemployment in the Arab States, Northern Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, much of Europe and in Central and Western Asia are becoming normalized through their persistence. Among IOs, only the multi-stakeholder partnerships now operate 'on location' across these regions.

Whether the de facto separation of the work of the ILO and WB proves more productive than their past partnerships remains to be seen. The insertion of UNICEF into the feld compounds the uncertainty. As other one-time IO actors in this feld fell away 'after the crisis', perhaps the question of greatest importance is whether the re-distributional powers inherent in the global social governance of youth (un)employment policy can reasonably be deemed adequate—especially in a world in which the numbers of 15–24-year-olds who are not in employment or studying or training is still estimated to substantially exceed 100 million. One certainty, though, is that the work of all three leading IOs will be severely tested by the immanent transnational effects of the SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) pandemic of 2020 and beyond with regard to collapsing labor markets in which young people are reliably the frst victims.24

#### References


<sup>24</sup>For a fuller exposition see Fergusson and Yeates (2021).


World Bank. 2011. Social protection and labor strategy 2012–2022: resilience, equity and opportunity. Washington DC: World Bank.

Yeates, Nicola. 2000. *Globalisation and Social Policy*. London: Sage.


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# International Organizations and Global Labor Standards

*Friederike Römer, Jakob Henninger, and Thuy Dung Le*

# Introduction

Working conditions and labor standards vary drastically across countries and sectors. Especially—but not only—in the Global South, workers often face hazardous conditions at their workplace resulting in occupational accidents

This chapter is a product of the research conducted at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: froemer@uni-bremen.de; jakob.henninger@uni-bremen.de

T. D. Le

F. Römer (\*) • J. Henninger

Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: dle@bigsss-bremen.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 57

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_3

and work-related diseases. Examples of perilous circumstances and deathly events are tragically abundant. Based on data collected by the International Labour Organization (ILO), Hämäläinen, Takala and Boon Kiat (2017, 4) estimate that there are 2.78 million deaths due to work-related causes each year.1 This fgure shows that the issue goes beyond widely publicized incidents such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in 2013 which caused the death of at least 1134 workers. Improving working conditions for people across the world is therefore an urgent and topical matter. But it is not limited to standards on occupational safety: In fact, achieving consensus on what should constitute a set of global (minimum) labor standards is crucial to prevent a potential 'race to the bottom' that places competitiveness and maximum profts over safe and humane working conditions.

In this chapter, we set out to investigate how international and regional organizations have positioned themselves toward global labor standards. Two questions guide our analyses. First, we want to outline why there is no agreement among International Organizations (IOs) on what constitutes a set of desirable global labor standards. We argue that disagreement both between and within IOs persists for two reasons, namely conficting ideological beliefs on the desirability of labor standards, but also because of strong regional differences. In effect, this has contributed to a decentralized system of global governance which employs a variety of differentially effective enforcement mechanisms (see Hurd 2003). Second, we will take a look at how labor standards are governed at the level of regional organizations, investigating whether regional organizations might in fact be better equipped to come to agreements given that they represent more homogeneous groups of countries than IOs.

The chapter starts by briefy exploring various conceptualizations of labor standards and by outlining the two contesting discourses, namely the 'social' and the 'neoliberal' discourses, and how labor standards, notably Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining (FACB) rights, are perceived in each of these modes of thought. It proceeds to present the positions of three key international actors, the ILO, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank (WB). This selection does not constitute an exhaustive mapping of the feld, where other organizations, notably the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are also infuential actors.

<sup>1</sup>Their estimates are based on data for the years 2014 and 2015 (Hämäläinen et al. 2017, 5).

Restricting our analysis to the ILO, the WTO and the WB, however, allows us to juxtapose an organization strongly in favor of labor standards, an organization that claims to not be responsible for or even in opposition to labor standards, and an organization that has shifted its position to some extent.

Beyond the IOs, in this chapter we will assess how two regional organizations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), have approached the topic of labor standards. ASEAN and Mercosur are neither the only nor the most infuential standard setters in the population of regional organizations—for example the European Union (EU) is much more active in defning standards and enforcement mechanisms (see e.g. Orbie and Babarinde 2008). ASEAN and Mercosur are, however, interesting cases to illustrate how social and neoliberal discourses shape regional approaches to labor standards in contexts where labor-intensive industries are widespread among member states and introducing farreaching sets of labor standards might hamper competitiveness.

## Mapping the Population and Discourses of IOs Active in the Field of Global Labor Standards

There is no agreement on what the term 'labor standards' denotes. As work may take on a variety of forms and is happening in highly diverse contexts, defning and delimiting standards is highly contextual. When assessing organizations' positions, however, it is helpful to rely on a defnition that can be used as a benchmark. Based on a systematic literature review,2 we fnd that authors agree that labor standards are a multidimensional concept that is made up of a number of different sub-components, but that there is no general consensus on the sub-concepts that should be included in a defnition. Over 20 different components are mentioned at least once, among them are "hiring regulations" (Gwartney et al. 2012; Murillo 2005; Potrafke 2013; Blanchard and Wolfers 2000; Nickell 1997; Botero et al. 2004), laws that prohibit forced labor (Anner 2012; Anner and Caraway 2010; Barrientos and Smith 2007; Cingranelli and Richards 2014; OECD 2000; Portes 1994) and a right to unemployment benefts (Blanchard and Wolfers 2000; Botero et al. 2004).

What explains the gaping differences between defnitions? To some extent, the breadth (or narrowness) of defnitions aligns with two

<sup>2</sup>We conducted a search on Web of Science using the search terms "labo\* rights" and "labo\* standards". We restricted the review to the most infuential articles, which we defned as those having >100 citations and being in relevant categories. This amounted to 15 studies.

competing views on the desirability and reach of such standards: the 'neoliberal' and the 'social' perspectives. According to the neoliberal perspective, labor standards are problematic because they undermine the 'free' operation of the market, hampering the generation of proft. In this view, labor standards are only benefcial when they are geared toward productivity and compliance, not decommodifcation. Labor standards are thus seen critically, and a limited set of rights—if any—is favored. The social discourse on the other hand includes a strong commitment to a set of farreaching rights and standards, even though there is often considerable disagreement in regard to insider/outsider divides within the social discourse (see also Ehmke et al. 2009, 17–20 for a detailed discussion of the positions of capital and labor).

Interestingly, authors included in the literature review agree in regard to one subcomponent of labor standards. All defnitions include FACB rights. As FACB rights allow workers to organize and represent their own interests, they are a basis for many other rights and standards (see e.g. Langille 2005, 430; Berliner et al. 2015). "The formation of a union, good faith collective bargaining, and withholding one's labor to improve terms and conditions of employment are enabling rights. They do not dictate outcomes but guarantee procedures that mitigate the inherent power imbalance in the employment relationship" (Anner 2012, 610). The right to freedom of association and collective bargaining thus affects in how far markets are regulated and the way society is organized as a whole (Mosley 2010, 103–104). Because FACB rights touch upon fundamental class and power relations, they are likely to be contested and are in fact threatened in many countries (Visser 2019). In this chapter we will therefore use FACB rights as a benchmark to assess how IOs have approached Global Labor Standards.

We examine the stances of three major IOs toward labor standards: Firstly, the ILO, which remains the most infuential standard-setting international organization in the feld of labor standards. Other organizations continue to rely on the cognitive authority of the ILO to defne benchmarks in the feld (Ehmke et al. 2009, 14; see also Baccaro 2014; Senghaas-Knobloch 2019). However, as was foreshadowed in the introduction, we also consider organizations that are not 'responsible' for labor standards in the narrower sense: On the one hand, we include the WTO, which could potentially provide effective enforcement instruments but has refrained from taking an active position on labor standards. On the other hand, we discuss the position of the World Bank which has moved from contestation to cooperation with the ILO.

It is important to note that a large literature attests that IOs are not the only infuential actors in the feld of global labor standards (Hendrickx et al. 2016; Hassel 2008; Hassel et al. 2008; Alston 2004). Multistakeholder initiatives, multinational corporations, international unions, NGOs and grassroots movements have become important actors, particularly when it comes to implementation, control and enforcement (see e.g. O'Rourke 2003; Kolben 2011; Anner 2012). Of special relevance in this context is the UN Global Compact, which is something of a hybrid. Though initiated and overseen by the United Nations (UN), it is a voluntary association of businesses that aims to ensure adherence to a set of social and environmental standards (see Ruggie 2002; Hurd 2003).3 Giving an account of all these different organizations and initiatives would be outside the scope of this chapter. However, we will touch upon them in those cases where they systematically infuenced or were infuenced by IOs.

#### *The International Labour Organization: The Promoter of Labor Standards as a Social Project*

In 2019, the ILO celebrated its centenary anniversary. It is the oldest and the only global body responsible for the formulation and inspection of internationally recognized labor standards. The ILO is also the only tripartite UN agency, having succeeded in involving representatives of governments, employers and workers in its decision-making process (ILO 2002). To date, the ILO has established 190 Conventions (including eight Fundamental Conventions, four Governance Conventions and other Technical Conventions), 6 Protocols and 206 Recommendations. FACB rights are fundamental to the ILO, which is frst and foremost mirrored in its institutional set-up—union members supply the worker representatives for its tripartite structure (ILO 2019b). Furthermore, promoting FACB rights has been one of the ILO's aims from the start. The Declaration of Philadelphia mentions both "freedom of expression and of association" and "the effective recognition of the right of collective bargaining" (ILO 1944, 4–5). The two relevant conventions, C087 - Freedom of Association

<sup>3</sup>For a critical assessment of the "promise-performance gap" of the UN Global Compact, see Sethi and Schepers (2014).

and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention (No. 87) and C098 - Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention (No. 98), date from 1948 and 1949 respectively. Importantly, however, the social discourse pursued by the ILO has gone far beyond focusing on the enabling FACB rights. ILO conventions and regulations defne labor standards in regard to a wide array of different aspects, covering not only protection for those at work, but also protection for those unable to work (unemployment, old age, sickness and disability insurance). This far-reaching defnition of labor standards refected by a large number of conventions has also been called the "maximalist approach" (Alston 2004, 465).

It has been argued that the social discourse pursued by the ILO was relatively strong in a world system characterized by two competing political ideologies. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the threat of communism as a credible alternative to market capitalism and consequently weakened the ILO (Kaufman 2004, 552). During the 1990s, the organization shifted from a maximalist approach to promoting a narrower set of standards. In 1998, the 'Core Labour Standards' (CLS) were introduced. They are comprised of eight fundamental rights conventions which cover four dominant issues: freedom from forced labor, freedom from child labor, freedom from discrimination at work and the freedom to form and join a union and to bargain collectively.4 Importantly, the CLS apply to all ILO member states regardless of whether they have ratifed them (ILO 1998). This constituted an important shift in the social discourse. CLS were framed as truly global, a set of rights which does not need national government approval.

The literature agrees on the fact that the introduction of the CLS in 1998 marks a watershed (Alston 2004; Alston 2005; Langille 2005; Maupain 2005; Standing 2008). However, there is sharp disagreement about whether they represent an upgrading or downgrading of labor standards in the international regime. Numerous authors have argued that the CLS refect a defeat of labor interests because they focus on a smaller

4Freedom of association and collective bargaining: C087 - Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87), C098 - Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98); Forced labor: C029 - Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), C105 - Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105); Discrimination: C100 - Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), C111 - Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111); Child labor: C138 - Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138), C182 - Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182).

group of rights at the expense of the much broader body of labor standards covered by the conventions, thus marking a very signifcant departure from the approach that all human rights are equally important (see e.g. Alston 2004, 2005). There are, however, also a number of voices arguing that the CLS were an adequate response to the increasing dominance of trade liberalization and neoliberalism in national and international institutions. Maupain stresses that since the introduction of the CLS, ratifcation of the respective conventions has increased considerably (Maupain 2005, 439). Despite criticism of the loose wording in the Conventions and Recommendations, the CLS nevertheless stand as the most infuential source of defning minimum standards, with the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining remaining at the heart of the ILO's goals (Standing 2008; Langille 2005).

Furthermore, the CLS do not stand alone but are accompanied by the Decent Work Agenda (DWA), which includes a more encompassing conceptualization of labor standards. The DWA encompasses the CLS as one of four pillars next to employment creation, expansion of social protection and promotion of tripartite agreements as well as social dialogue (Bakvis and McCoy 2008, 2). Through the CLS and the DWA, the ILO thus continues to defne benchmarks for global labor standards that include and go beyond FACB rights.

In recent years, however, the ILO's signifcance has been challenged in two ways. First, the ILO has had to consider its relations to other actors that have newly emerged or gained importance. The role of international unions has continued to expand in scope in recent years, with unions developing into effective actors in international labor relations (Fairbrother and Hammer 2005; Croucher and Cotton 2009; Ford and Gillan 2015). Unions directly negotiate with multinational companies and sign International Framework Agreements that ensure the company-wide respect of labor standards across multiple countries (Dehnen 2013; McCallum 2013). Similarly, grassroots and civil society organizations are channeling consumers' awareness of working conditions in the global production chain. This has resulted in infuential public campaigns that have led to responses from multinational corporations (Barrientos and Smith 2007, 715). Among those responses are increases in the use of corporate codes of conduct since the 1990s (Bartley 2005). The ILO's role has been one of support through capacity building, technical assistance and provision of legitimacy (Baccaro 2014, 265), but actual control over these corporatist actors is limited. This has led some authors to the conclusion that the ILO has not been able to defend workers' interests and that the social discourse has failed (see e.g. Farnsworth 2005; Hilgert 2009). In a more recent study, however, Thomas and Turnbull (2017) fnd that policy entrepreneurs within the ILO are successfully promoting the idea that a new form of governance is needed that can target transnational actors, notably multinational corporations.

A second challenge arises from the fact that the ILO has traditionally tended to represent formal workers and to neglect the situation of marginalized workers such as informal workers or migrant workers (Cox 1980; Prügl 1999; Vosko 2002; Whitworth 1997). Yet these make up a large part of the global workforce. The ILO's legitimacy as the organization most knowledgeable about any issue related to labor thus hinges on incorporating and supporting these groups that have not traditionally been its main clientele. Furthermore, interest groups representing informal workers are emerging across the globe. The response of the ILO has been to suggest unionizing the informal workforce. The report "Organizing Informal Workers into Trade Unions" is a guide that is supposed to help unions identify and organize relevant populations (ILO 2019a). One could conclude that Vosko's (2002) claim that the ILO seems to be less market-oriented than in previous years still holds today, and that a labororiented discourse on labor standards prevails, with FACB rights as the fundamental principle. The ILO thus appears to continue to normatively defne labor standards within the global discourse in a comparatively encompassing way.

#### *The World Trade Organization: The Persistent Trade Promoter*

The WTO is the largest international economic organization in the world. In contrast to the ILO's tripartite structure, the WTO gathers only governmental and business representatives at the negotiating table of trade treaties and is operated by consensus. The bargaining power of workers or domestic politics in labor standards promotion is often limited throughout the process. The WTO has persistently pursued a neoliberal discourse, which challenges labor-related laws and regulations as factors of market distortion. According to this point of view, there is no obligation for the WTO to contribute to ensuring adherence to these standards.

From the 1980s onward, the debate on 'social clauses' raised the question as to whether there should be a formal link established between global trade and global labor standards. Interestingly, it was not primarily the ILO that initiated this discussion. In fact, among ILO offcials there was some reluctance to adopt strong sanctioning mechanisms in order to achieve compliance to labor standards (Haworth et al. 2005, 1946) and international unions, notably the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions/International Trade Union Confederation (ICFTU/ ITUC), took the initiative instead (van Roozendaal 2002). The main argument of the international unions was that there was a risk of a 'race to the bottom' in the global trade and production network. The argument claims that in a globalized economy, weak labor standards are a competitive advantage (Chan 2003; Davies and Vadlamannati 2013; Drezner 2001). Low labor standards in one country may therefore trigger a deterioration in labor standards in other countries which face competitive pressures to weaken or refrain from strengthening their own labor standards. A social clause would have allowed importing countries to make use of trade sanctions against exporting countries that did not respect a previously defned set of labor standards (Van Liemt 1989).

The proposition to include a social clause was met with ferce opposition by developing countries in the Global South who believed this clause would be used for protectionist purposes. Workers' representatives were also divided on the issue: Those from countries with stronger labor standards supported the clause, whereas workers from countries with lower standards faced a dilemma, as raising labor standards posed a threat to competitiveness and the creation of new jobs (Stallings 2010, 128). The last major effort to link labor standards into global trade through concerted efforts of the ILO and the WTO took place at the World Trade Organization Ministerial Meeting in Singapore in 1996. At the conference, all WTO member governments agreed to committing to core labor standards, but emphasized that the WTO should not be the body responsible for enforcing them. Instead, the WTO pointed to the ILO as the competent body responsible for setting and monitoring labor standards.

The WTO talks held in Seattle in 1999 ultimately resulted in a failure to make any progress on the contents of the next round of global trade negotiations. One of the main causes of dissent among the participants was again the issue of including labor standards in international trade agreements (Bhagwati 2001). Given the shortcomings of multilateral trade negotiations, the number of bilateral trade agreements outside the ambit of the WTO has since exploded. A number of these include social clauses. In the global discourse, however, the WTO ultimately retained the position that labor standards are neither its competency nor responsibility. Even though the secretariats of the ILO and WTO work together on technical issues under the banner of 'coherence' in global economic policy making, there is evidence that labor standards are not only not promoted by the WTO, but that they are framed as impeding WTO objectives. Analyzing World Trade Reports from 2003–2017, Delgado (2019) fnds that the WTO Secretariat continues to frame deregulatory reforms as desirable.

#### *The World Bank: The Advocate for Neoliberalism in Labor Standards as a Development Project*

The International Financial Institutions (IFIs), that is the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the regional development banks, have often put labor standards into question and, for the sake of a development project, demand more labor fexibility over labor protection (see e.g. Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007; Anner and Caraway 2010). Empirical studies have shown that IFIs have actually undermined labor rights in the countries in which they were active. For instance, Blanton, Blanton and Peksen (2015) fnd that policy reforms recommended by IFIs undermined collective labor organization and the adoption of protective laws (see also Martin and Brady 2007).

The World Bank is an informative example of how ideas and discourse may evolve within IOs (Béland and Orenstein 2013). Having followed a neoliberal agenda from the 1980s, demanding structural adjustments in return for much of its lending, the World Bank refused to promote labor standards for a long time (Murphy 2014). From the late 1990s onward, however, the institution entered into dialogue with the ILO and with unions as well as civil society organizations (Hagen 2003; Murphy 2014). It is important to note, however, that FACB rights were only promoted once it had been proven that they would not threaten the main objective of the neoliberal discourse, that is economic growth. In response to a study that failed to fnd negative impacts of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights on economic growth, its executive board agreed on a statement in support of "the promotion of good practice related to all four Core Labour Standards" (Fryer 2003, 8).

The World Bank also changed the methodology of its infuential Doing Business report to no longer penalize countries with strong labor regulations in its "ease of doing business" index (Murphy 2014, 414). Labor standards also fgure in the World Bank's Environmental and Social Framework, in the second set of standards. The Environmental and Social Standards (ESS) 2 "Labor and Working Conditions" has the following objectives with regard to World Bank projects: health and safety at work, fair treatment, non-discrimination and equal opportunity, protection of vulnerable workers including migrants, prevention of forced and child labor, the support of "principles of freedom of association and collective bargaining of project workers in a manner consistent with national law" and the creation of complaints mechanisms (World Bank 2018, 1). The guidelines reference the eight ILO Conventions that constitute the CLS (World Bank 2018, 1–2). Thus, the World Bank has moved from a position of contestation of ideas brought forward by the ILO to a more cooperative stance.

## Regional Organizations in the Regime of Global Labor Governance

In this section we examine regional organizations' stances toward labor standards and specifcally FACB rights. As outlined in the introduction, labor standards are highly contextual, and the sets of standards and rights which are considered both desirable and feasible are likely to differ between countries and regions. As we have shown, regional differences have in some instances led to deadlock at the international level, notably within the WTO. Regional organizations as intermediary levels of agency between the nation-state and global institutions (Börzel and Risse 2009) may be better equipped to avoid such deadlocks. The groups of countries coming together in regional organizations tend to be more similar to each other than those involved in global multilateral negotiations, and therefore decision-making processes are less protracted (Yeates and Deacon 2009, 470).

Both ASEAN and Mercosur have member states that were opposed to the social clause within the WTO. The two organizations differ, however, in regard to how much their member states rely on labor intensive production, and the share of exports as a percentage of GDP is higher among ASEAN member states, making them more dependent on cheap labor (Fink and Rempe 2017). Another difference stems from the fact that while FACB rights remain limited in most ASEAN member states, Mercosur's approach to FACB rights is shaped by the strong involvement of trade unions at the national level. This is mirrored in the ratifcation of the relevant ILO treaties. Whereas only four and six of the ten ASEAN member states have ratifed ILO conventions No. 87 and No. 98 on FACB rights respectively, all Mercosur member states have done so. ASEAN has in recent years started promoting FACB rights, but this has been piecemeal and with limited impact on member states. Mercosur's approach to FACB rights on the other hand is more participatory, as evidenced both by the strong involvement of trade unions in the elaboration of labor rights declarations, but also in the emphasis put on these rights in the declarations themselves.

#### *The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)*

ASEAN member states have a mixed track record when it comes to engagement with global labor governance.5 Before the early 2000s, ASEAN did not explicitly include human rights in its agenda (Davies 2013, 385–386) and did not adopt a social approach to labor standards either. Questions of labor standards were peripheral (O'Brien 2008, 146), even though sectoral issues like work environment (ASEAN 2012b), the reduction of child labor (ASEAN 1993), and occupational health and safety (ASEAN-OSHNET 2015) were discussed. ASEAN was even hostile toward the promotion of labor rights in international forums. In fact, the organization's Economic Ministers' Meeting in April 1996 announced their refusal to accept social clauses in the WTO (Mah 1998, 297).

From the early 2000s, ASEAN adopted a discourse more amenable to workers' rights and the concept of "people-centered ASEAN" became a leitmotif in many of the organization's documents (Morada 2008). This shift resulted, among other things, in the 2012 ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). While it should be stressed that it is non-binding, the Declaration includes many workers' rights, including the right to social security and freedom from forced labor (ASEAN 2013, 5–8). In regard to FACB rights, however, the declaration contains the limitation that these rights must be "in accordance with national laws and regulations" (ASEAN 2013, 8). In 2012, ASEAN also issued an "ASEAN Guideline on Good Industrial Relations Practices" calling for "[f]reedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining" (ASEAN 2012a, 3). Furthermore, there is some evidence that

<sup>5</sup>Out of the ten ASEAN member states, only Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines have ratifed all Core ILO Conventions (Brown 2016, 35–36).

ASEAN is responding to the ILO's cognitive authority with regard to its "Decent Work" discourse, the concept appearing in documents such as the "ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025" (ASEAN 2016a) and the "Vientiane Declaration on Transition from Informal Employment to Formal Employment towards Decent Work Promotion in ASEAN" (ASEAN 2016b). The objectives set out for labor standards in the Blueprint are detailed in ASEAN Labor Ministers' Work Programs and the Work Plans of subsidiary bodies (ASEAN 2017) with at least the implicit goal of harmonizing labor laws, including industrial relations (Sale 2020, 38).

Regional free trade agreements also tend to not include labor provisions: For instance, the proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership between ASEAN countries, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, is unlikely to do so (Brown 2016, 47). Truly regional frameworks on labor standards are also rare: An exception is the ASEAN Convention against Traffcking in Persons signed in 2015, which builds on global initiatives and requires ASEAN member states to transpose it into their national legislations. ASEAN has thus taken up global discourses seeking to harmonize labor standards across member states, but these attempts have been met with little success (Brown 2016; Sale 2020).

Both the concept of "organizational feld" and the intrinsic features (Niemann et al. in this volume) of ASEAN may explain some of these diffculties. Firstly, with regard to the former, Sale (2020) argues that differing belief systems underlying national labor laws mar harmonization. For instance, labor market regulation in Malaysia focuses on employers' interests in providing an inexpensive workforce, whereas worker protections take center stage to a larger extent in the Philippines, indicating that harmonization of their labor standards will be diffcult (Sale 2020). But lack of progress in regional harmonization of labor standards can also be traced back to intrinsic features of the organization: ASEAN has in fact long prided itself on its soft approach as well as prevailing norms of noninterference and consensus decision-making, so much so as to call this the "ASEAN way" to approach regionalism (Acharya 1997, 320). Consequently, many of the above-mentioned regulations, such as the AHRD, remain non-binding and thus with questionable impact.

#### *Southern Common Market (Mercosur)*

Mercosur has created a relatively coherent legal framework for the protection of labor standards, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, as will be shown in this section. The organization promotes the participation of social partners in tripartite processes. In doing so, the organization references and thereby broadcasts global labor standards. This does not necessarily translate into promotion of these standards beyond the confnes of the region, however.

When Mercosur was created it focused on free trade without any provision on labor (or other) rights (Ermida Uriarte 1999, 105). However, early treaties on Mercosur's institutional set-up created a Working Sub-Group No. 10 on labor issues, employment and social security and the Economic and Social Advisory Forum (Olmos Giupponi 2014, 74). It is worth noting that a regional association of trade unions that predates Mercosur, the Coordinadora de Centrales Sindicales del Cono Sur founded in 1986, has a seat in both of these groups and has played a vital role in promoting the issue of workers' rights in Mercosur in the 1990s (Ermida Uriarte 1999, 117). Mercosur member states signed the Multilateral Social Security Agreement in 1997 and the Mercosur Socio-Labor Declaration in the following year (Olmos Giupponi 2014, 75). The Declaration referenced a number of human rights treaties, but importantly also the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work which had just been adopted that same year (Mercosur 1998, 1). It contained a number of individual worker rights, but also the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. This included, explicitly, a right to strike (Mercosur 1998, 6–7). The parties to the declaration furthermore committed to fostering social dialogue (Mercosur 1998, 7). The Declaration was non-binding, however, and Mercosur treaties generally need to be incorporated into the domestic laws of most member states (Malamud 2020; Olmos Giupponi 2014).

In terms of enforcement bodies, the Declaration created a Regional Socio-Labor Commission, though with purely promotional tasks and without any means of sanctioning member states (Mercosur 1998, 10–11). It should be noted that as the Socio-Labor Declaration was not directly linked to the founding documents of Mercosur, violations of the norm could also not be dealt with within the Mercosur dispute settlement mechanisms (Castello 2016, 79). There has been quite some debate on whether it might be directly applicable, and this depended on the legal systems of the member states: Only the Argentinian constitution follows the principle of monism, that is direct applicability of international norms (Olmos Giupponi 2014). In any case, the declaration contained many rights that are granted with reference to national legislation, but regardless of national differences in transposition, Castello (2016, 79) contends that labor tribunals in all member states have made reference to the Declaration in rulings.

The Declaration was updated in 2015 after a tripartite process and aims to reaffrm and deepen labor rights (Castello 2016). The 2015 declaration reiterates its support for the ILO Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, but also takes up more recent international discourse on labor standards, putting the ILO "Decent Work" agenda at center stage (Mercosur 2015). This entails the inclusion of a number of standards for individual workers like maximum work hours (Castello 2016, 84), though collective rights are also slightly expanded in the new document: Signatory states commit to efforts to actively strengthen employees' (and employers') representation and collective bargaining mechanisms, the latter now also explicitly open to public sector employees (Castello 2016, 84). The revised declaration also substantiates the competencies of the Socio-Labor Commission which can now make recommendations to member states and meets twice as often as before (Mercosur 2015, 14–16).

The previous sections have shown that agreements on labor standards within Mercosur are developing. There is also a certain degree of technical cooperation through the Mercosur Labor Market Observatory established in 1998 to monitor labor market developments (Munck 2001, 18). In how far Mercosur advocates labor standards in its relations with other countries is less clear. Franca-Filho, Lixinski and Olmos Giupponi (2014, 821–822) point out that Mercosur has concluded trade agreements with various countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and South Asia without including human rights provisions. In conclusion, Mercosur can be seen as a broadcaster of ideas (Niemann et al. in this volume) regarding global labor standards such as Decent Work or the CLS at the regional level. The development of these norms was aided by the strong presence of labor actors such as trade unions in the process of regional integration.

### Labor Standards for Everyone? An Outlook

In this chapter we compared how three International and two Regional Organizations, namely the ILO, the WTO and the World Bank, as well as ASEAN and Mercosur, approach the global governance of labor standards. We argue that two main discourses have been pursued in the global debate, a 'social' discourse and a 'neoliberal' discourse. We fnd that organizations whose intrinsic features allow for an institutionalized representation of worker's interests pursue variations of the social discourse, whereas those that do not stay closer to a neoliberal position. This is true both at the international and regional level. We furthermore show that the coexistence of these two conficting discourses has led to contestation, but also exchange and cooperation, and that the ILO remains the cognitive authority in the feld.

Two sets of challenges seem especially relevant for the future of global governance on labor standards. First, there is still a gap between promises and enforcement due to capacity constraints, market pressures and 'cheap ratifcation'. In how far this gap will be closed depends on the ability of the ILO and powerful trading partners, such as the US and the EU, to incentivize pro-labor reforms. Second, the rapid technological transformation across industries and manufacturing sites results in a wide range of changes, in terms of the nature of formal work contracts, industrial relations at the workplace and how the global production network will be organized across nations. This new wave of technology will alter the traditional understanding of actual bargaining power of low-skilled workers at frms and factories in both developed or developing countries. The coming leap forward in technology challenges the existing global labor governance regime to catch up with industry practices and market forces as well as to come up with new governance strategies in order to limit the effect of negative externalities or social disruption on the poor, low-skilled working class. In how far these developments will weaken or strengthen the relative power of the social discourse remains to be seen.

#### References


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# International Organizations, Care and Migration: The Case of Migrant Health Care Workers

*Nicola Yeates and Jane Pillinger*

# Introduction

This chapter focuses on international health care worker migration to illustrate shifting constellations of architectures of ideas, actors and institutions in global social governance and policy. The phenomenon of health worker migration and how the international community should respond to it is one that has long preoccupied International Organizations (IOs) (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b). It is the earliest case of care as an overtly institutionalized feld of global social policy, long predating IOs' initiatives on childcare, domestic care and care of migrants. It has been an active area of global social policymaking throughout the post-WWII period. Thus, a discernible global social policy feld of health care worker migration was instituted from the outset of the United Nations (UN), developing and

N. Yeates (\*) • J. Pillinger

Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: n.yeates@open.ac.uk

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 83

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_4

expanding over the ensuing decades. As the chapter shows, this global policy feld is complex, contested and dynamic. It is populated by numerous IOs and other transnational actors promulgating myriad discourses, forging international agreements and entering into partnership—some are complementary, others are competing.

One chapter cannot do justice to the feld's complexity and dynamics, and therefore it focuses on mapping key contours of this global social policy feld in the form of IOs operating on the most extensive multilateral scale. The chapter's core emphasis is therefore on global organizational sources of *public* authority; private sources of authority within global governance are outside the scope of the chapter. The discussion draws on our on-going work on this topic—most recently in a co-authored research monograph (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a) where we examine the origins of IOs' involvement in shaping the feld and demonstrate the substantial long-standing history of global governance and policy in this feld. There we amply showed how the institutional architectures and discourses of contemporary global health workforce migration governance and policy are best understood as being produced through intersections of *multiple policy felds* (notably, health, migration, social protection, labor, trade, equality and human rights). The full implications of this are discussed further in Yeates and Pillinger (2019a), but it is worth highlighting at this point that expanding the analytical vista beyond intersections of global health policy and global migration policy opens our gaze onto a far broader institutional terrain, a much wider range of IOs and transnational policy actors active in this feld, and far more complex global social policy dynamics than has hitherto been appreciated. This chapter does not rehearse these arguments, but picks up key ideas from them. It incorporates additional analysis prepared purposefully for this chapter.

The remainder of the chapter is organized around four principal sections. Section "Mapping the Population of International Organizations" identifes the principal IOs active in the global policy feld since the foundation of the UN system, showing how they have changed over time. It relates this changing IO population to the expanding 'universe' of state and non-state policy actors active in this feld and discerns principal characteristics of this population over the period examined. Section "Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs" considers the IOs' policy discourses in this feld. Emphasizing the multiplicity of policy concepts, approaches and discourses circulating in this feld, we discuss the extent to which they are attributable to any single IO and how they might relate to IOs' organizational ecology. Here, IOs' organizational mandate and governance are accorded signifcance because they structure which actors participate in IOs' policy-formation processes and how they do so. In other words, mandates and governance structures determine who has proposal (and veto) rights within global policy. Section "Inter-actor Relationships of Cooperation, Coordination and Contestation" picks up on the multifarious nature of global social policy discourse(s) in this feld, to discuss how they are shaped by cooperation, contestation and competition among IOs. We emphasize that such relations are integral to this feld, albeit with an apparent trend in increased inter-IO cooperation, particularly over the last decade. This does not signal an erosion of competing policy approaches, which continue to be manifested in the context of the trend toward inter-IO global policy partnerships; contestation remains a central feature of the global policy feld. Section "Conclusion" draws the chapter to a conclusion, where we synthesize key points from the discussion and refect on these in terms of scalar and relational approaches to global social governance and policy.

# Mapping the Population of International Organizations

#### *Historical Constellations of International Organizations*

The numerous IOs constitute a signifcant share of the total population of transnational policy actors active in the global policy feld of health worker migration. This section discusses the expansion of IOs involved in this feld. It signals the extent to which the feld has been marked by policy contestation, competition and coordination—a theme which is taken up in more detail in Sections "Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs" and "Inter-actor Relationships of Cooperation, Coordination and Contestation".

To begin with, it is worth noting that the organizational features of this global policy feld share many of the characteristics of migration governance more generally. While the World Trade Organization (WTO) oversees trade negotiations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with the Financial Stability Board, manages capital mobility, there is no single IO regulating migration. The World Health Organization (WHO) approaches issues of migration from a health needs and a 'human resources for health' perspective, while the International Labour Organisation (ILO) focuses on labor and social protection issues affecting all categories of labor, migrant or otherwise. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has an interest in health worker migration from the perspective of children's rights to health, although it does not participate in shaping this policy feld. United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) interest is from the perspective of education and training, and in international educational exchanges and mobility of highly educated labor. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) interest is in the labor content (migratory and otherwise) of the international trade/development nexus. The World Bank (WB) has an interest in migration as a factor in wider economic development. Only the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has a sole focus on migration issues, but for most of its history it has sat outside the UN system. It has no regulatory or standard-setting role, and in keeping with its main emphasis on lower-skilled migration, displacement and returns it does not cover skilled health worker migration other than through more general diasporic approaches (Yeates and Pillinger 2018, 2019a, 15). Various other consultative global fora operate within and outside of the UN to promote multilateral dialogue, such as the High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development, the Global Migration Group and the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), though they have no role in the development of multilateral policies or standards and their involvement in health worker migration and recruitment has not been evident. The International Platform on Health Worker Mobility, which is part of the ILO, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), WHO *Working for Health* program (HEEG 2016) (Section "Inter-actor Relationships of Cooperation, Coordination and Contestation"), builds upon the High-Level Dialogue on International Health Worker Migration that took place in Dublin in 2017.

Table 4.1 below provides an overarching summary of the period examined. It plots the active IO population over time, along with key policy concepts and principal landmark agreements in the global policy feld.

Against a backdrop of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) international trade regime underpinning the post-WWII globalizing liberal order, the dominant IOs in this global policy feld are member organizations of the UN system. The global policy feld on international health worker migration originated within the UN system from its earliest days. WHO frst reported on the consequences of the global dynamics of international health worker migration in the 1950s in the context of its


**Table 4.1** Active IOs since 1945 (*continued*)


Source: the author, based on research data published in Yeates and Pillinger (2019a)

**Table 4.1**

(continued)

Fellowships scheme, but it did not initiate the global feld as an arena of policy as political practice, nor was it a frontrunner in it for much of the feld's early history. Indeed, for much of the post-war period, this space was dominated by UNESCO, UNCTAD and the ILO. WHO started to participate more actively in an already extant policy feld at the end of the 1960s, within the terms of the debate set by these other UN agencies. These agencies were decisive in the early defnition of the global policy feld and had played a crucial role in identifying the *global* policy issues at stake since the early 1960s. UNESCO was the frst UN (or any) global agency to explicitly identify international health worker migration as a global *social policy* issue, raising questions about the transfers of national (educational and training) resources involved in emigration. UNCTAD's focus on the 'brain drain' and 'reverse transfers of technology' framed health worker migration as a factor of economic and industrial development. Of note here are its attempts to negotiate an international agreement to regulate and help reverse highly skilled health care worker migration. The ILO's mandate meant its involvement was through the prism of international labor migration, instantiated through its tripartite elaboration of international labor standards. These standards were applicable to all workers and were not sector-specifc, but nevertheless related to the recruitment and working conditions of migrant health workers in tangible ways. Organizations of employers and workers were the only non-state policy actors involved in shaping the feld at the time, and this remained the case until the 2000s (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a).

The frst global institutional landmark agreement was concluded in 1977 (ILO Nursing Personnel Recommendation). This was spurred by the ILO's activism in the mid-1970s on international labor migration and gender equality more generally, which unfolded in the context of the UN's New International Economic Order (NIEO) initiative and gave concrete expression to two international human rights covenants concluded in 1966. WHO had by this time initiated a major global study of medical and nurse migration, but although it had provided substantial ideational input it was unable to translate its conclusions and recommendations into a WHO Resolution or a general program of work or similar. This stalling did not seem to be due to a lack of demand by governments for international action. Indeed, this translational work was passed on to the ILO, which adopted a draft Recommendation in the space of a year. The rapid passage of a proposal into an agreement refected the mounting 'anxiety' expressed by many source country governments throughout the 1960s and 1970s of increasing emigration of their health workers and adverse impacts on their health systems. Correspondingly, it gave further impetus to the urgent need for internationally agreed-upon principles for the recruitment and employment of overseas health workers (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a).

The changed political and economic priorities of the late 1970s and 1980s marked a signifcant shift in the international political economy of global social policy, stalling momentum that could otherwise have built on the ILO Recommendation. IMF, WB and OECD policies on structural adjustment and health sector reforms strongly conditioned the working and living conditions of health workforces across many countries, which, combined with the liberalization of labor migration, contributed substantially to a growing global public health crisis in many countries. It was not that these IOs directly shaped global policy debate about health worker migration, but their activism in the wider realm of health and trade governance, notably through their promulgation of neoliberal and deregulatory social and economic reforms, impacted on the material conditions of health workforces that the UN (and its social agencies) had long been trying to address through labor, education and trade sectors. The effects of global neoliberalism on this global policy feld were felt most keenly by the ILO, WHO, UNESCO and UNCTAD whose policy space to consolidate and extend prior agreements in the interests of migrant workers and developing countries' health services shrunk considerably. The growing emphasis on economic liberalization, market integration and voluntary self-regulation combined to stall the momentum gained by the UN agencies which had worked in formal and informal partnership with the labor movement and developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s. Such was the severity of that stalling that the 1980s and 1990s were, in effect, lost decades as far as progress in this policy feld is concerned (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b).

The opening years of the twenty-frst century marked somewhat of a turning point in this global policy feld. In health, international development ministries, the labor movement and the increasing number of (International) Non-governmental Organizations ((I)NGOs) dedicated to global health workforce issues and international health worker migration were pressing forcefully for better regulation of international recruitment as a means of stemming the growing global public health crisis and wider development impacts that were disproportionately borne by those countries (especially in Africa and Asia) least able to bear the effects of health worker emigration. From the early 2000s, 'ethical recruitment' initiatives started to proliferate and, although these favored voluntary selfregulation, they infuenced the discursive environment and empowered those (including WHO) calling for limits on the extent of recruitment of health workers from poor countries by rich ones (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b).

Elsewhere, growing activism to strengthen global migration governance and policy more generally forged new institutional spaces and processes outside of the UN system, notably in the GFMD and IOM1 which to some extent addressed health workforce issues and their intersections with migration. The GFMD proved to be a conduit for policy renewal in global health worker migration governance especially in relation to temporary and circular migration, a signifcant policy idea that also features prominently in World Bank and IOM discourses (Section "Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs"). During the 2000s, ethical recruitment initiatives not only proliferated but multilateralized, culminating in the second dedicated multilateral agreement in this global policy feld—the Global Code of Practice on the Ethical Recruitment of Health Personnel (hereafter, Global Code) (WHO 2010). The alliance formed to advocate for and negotiate the Global Code refected the expansion of the IO 'universe' since the 1970s. The ILO, WHO and IOM were especially active, alongside Ministers of Health, Labor and International Development from source and destination countries, and a highly active civil society initiative (Health Worker Migration Initiative (HWMI).2 The Global Code is a signifcant milestone in the history of the global policy feld, though it is more permissive of continuing large-scale international migration and recruitment of health workers than the 1977 ILO Nursing Personnel Recommendation (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b).

The years after the 2010 Global Code were ones during which WHO consolidated its position as a principal IO in this global policy feld. Its focus on the implementation of the Global Code paralleled efforts to mainstream issues of health worker recruitment and migration into global health and development policy, a feat achieved by its assertive stance on universal health coverage as a central global health policy objective (SDG 5). Yet WHO is by no means the sole IO in this global policy feld. The

<sup>1</sup> IOM was incorporated into the UN in 2016.

<sup>2</sup>HWMI was a partnership between the NGO 'Realizing Rights: the Ethical Global Initiative' and the 'Global Health Workforce Alliance' (GHWA).

leitmotifs of sustainability and international partnership facilitate a pluralistic and expansive universe of policy actors. The ILO continues to be highly active in this global policy feld, focusing on labor rights, as does WHO, advocating a focus on health services within strengthened health systems. IOM's engagement with this feld is sporadic and limited, but ultimately supportive of circular migration. The OECD continues to be a signifcant presence, bringing expertise in data production and analysis of OECD migration trends and support for continued international recruitment by OECD countries. The World Bank is also becoming a more central actor. It has been a major proponent of the argument that greater international economic integration within the framework of the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services can facilitate greater mobility of health workers in ways that limit developing countries' losses (World Bank 2009, 2012). Other interventions have revolved around health work force composition and 'task shifting', health worker-to-population ratios and health workforce labor markets. World Bank offcials have argued that WHO staff-to-patient ratio norms are too high (Yeates and Pillinger 2013), challenging the international consensus that the ratios should be revised upwards.

The ILO, WHO and the World Bank—and prospectively, the WTO seem set to play a greater role in remaking the global policy feld over the coming years. One driver of this is the Global Commission on Health Employment and Growth (HEEG 2016) which recommended an inter-IO global health workforce initiative led by the ILO, WHO and the World Bank, and involving the OECD. It remains to be seen how this inter-IO dynamic will unfold, what new policy actors will be brought into the arena, what discursive shifts it will produce and how these will be manifested in the dynamics and outcomes of global policy itself. However, there are already signs that WHO is taking on board the need for stronger lateral connections between health, trade and labor, even if inscribing these connections within a revised Global Code seems a step too far for it at the moment. It has extended consultative status to labor actors (notably, PSI), is adopting ILO's occupational classifcation for future use and seems to accept the need for greater emphasis on labor economics (associated most with the World Bank). It will be of interest to see what other policy actors are brought into WHO work in this evolving feld and what role the WTO might play in the future. The WTO has self-consciously abstained from participating in this feld on the grounds that GATS is about mobility and not migration. However, the WHO's discursive (and apparent institutional) shift from migration to mobility3 plus its prospectively greater attention to health labor economics may open opportunities for the WTO and the World Bank to become more prominent infuences on the feld.

The SDGs are a further driver creating spaces for additional IOs to join this policy feld. Health worker migration and recruitment cuts across four SDGs (Health and Well-Being, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Reduced Inequalities, Partnership). SDG 17 identifes regional integration and regional entities in implementing the SDGs, opening up the prospect of a far larger role for IOs on a regional scale to infuence global policy in this and other felds (Yeates 2017). Indeed, WHO is already highlighting a greater role for regional formations in managing health worker migration (WHO 2016; Chanda 2019). In many ways, though, this regional emphasis builds on extant trends in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the East African Community (EAC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the EU whose institutional regimes already play a signifcant role in governing health worker recruitment and migration within their regional communities and their relations with 'third countries' (Yeates 2014, Yeates and Pillinger 2013, 2018). Also, the 2010 WHO Global Code has been implemented, in part, by being integrated into the European Commission Action Plan for the EU Health Workforce. Further measures or plans to integrate the principles into regional actions are reported from member states in the WHO Regional Offce for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO) network (Arab League), the Andean network, the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB) and the Council of Health Ministers of Central America (COMISCA) (WHO 2016). The SDGs' emphasis on partnership working is embedded in the idea of 'multistakeholderism', which structures diverse stakeholders (including INGOs, civil society organizations, employers, corporations) into policy formation for delivering the SDGs. In health, multistakeholder partnerships have so far been most obviously manifested in the increasing role of the private (for proft, corporate) sector in delivering universal health coverage and global health initiatives (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b).

Clearly there are different and competing currents running through the development of global policy in this feld. In terms of the broad

<sup>3</sup>Echoes of this discursive shift are apparent in the inter-IO International Health Worker Mobility Platform.

development of the feld, this review of its long history across its post-war era, the following points regarding the 'universe' of IOs populating this feld may be highlighted.

First, WHO may currently be the IO that is most associated with this global policy feld (by virtue of the 2010 Global Code), but from a longer historical perspective it has played a far less formative role. The ILO, UNESCO and UNCTAD, were at the foreground of shaping the defnition of the global policy issues at stake and elaborating on concrete *global* policy proposals in the 1960s, prior to WHO's joining this feld. Furthermore, WHO's contributions to the feld have been uneven: decades have passed without it making any contribution at all. Despite this, WHO undoubtedly has the second longest presence among IOs in the feld and presently functions as a principal convener of international initiatives in this feld. The changing constellations of IOs over the period are also evident in how UNESCO and UNCTAD are no longer the principal protagonists that they once were (indeed, they have withdrawn from the feld), and how the World Bank has been gaining greater prominence within the last decade.

Second, if the IOs involved in propelling the major initiatives and agreements can be taken as a proxy for the most powerful (infuential) actor in the global policy feld, then the ILO is the most consistently powerful UN social policy agency over time (see point above). In practice, though, the ILO and WHO have worked in informal partnership. This is most obviously seen in the 1970s when WHO handed over the task of translating the policy conclusions of its initiative to the ILO, which negotiated the Nursing Personnel Recommendation within the space of just one year. The dynamics of this historic partnership may well change over the coming years as the World Bank and others become more prominent.

Third, the changing constellation of IOs is seen in the expanding universe of IOs more generally. Prior to the 2000s, international non-state actors were comprised principally of international workers' and employers' organizations working through the ILO to form international labor standards. At the turn of the twenty-frst century, this universe of non-statist IOs had pluralized: a far greater number and range are now involved, organizing the ethical recruitment movement. This movement originated with non-state actors (health professionals etc.) which have worked with state actors (some source and destination country governments) and IOs through the HWMI to campaign for the Global Code and its implementation. This multi-actor alliance has succeeded in renewing attention to connections between health, development, labor migration and labor conditions.

Fourth, the most signifcant advances in the institutionalization of global policy (indicated by concrete multilateral agreements) have tended to follow major global initiatives in two felds: international development (UN Development Decades, NIEO, MDGs, SDGs) and international migration (ILO labor migration initiatives of the 1970s preceding the ILO Nursing Personnel Recommendation; UN initiatives in the late 1990s/mid 2000s to 'thicken' global migration governance; most recently the migration-related aspects of SDGs, Global Compact). We must not discount the formative infuence of global initiatives launching and sustaining neoliberalism and structural adjustment through fnance, development, trade and health. This points to the conclusion that the broader canvas of IOs and the institutional regimes in which they are embedded are essential to understanding the dynamics of the global policy feld of health worker migration governance. It is as important to attend to the broad canvas of global governance and policy when considering the population of relevant IOs (and discourses) and the dynamics of the global policy feld as it is to those IOs more explicitly operating within the policy domain. This conclusion speaks to the idea of 'exogenous organizational ecology' (Niemann et al., in this volume).

#### Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs

The organizational features of this global policy feld discussed in Section "Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs" indicate that just as there is no overarching global institutional migration governance framework on health worker migration, so there is no single predominant IO coordinating the policy feld. This global policy landscape points to dispersed mandates, authority, responsibility and power among the population of IOs. Most of the principal IOs engage with health worker migration as part of their broader remit, but they address health worker migration and recruitment in quite different ways.

Indeed, looking more closely at the concepts, approaches and discourses in this feld, we see multiplicity. IOs' policy discourses are multifarious. Policy issues identifed differ from one IO to another, each of which institute initiatives refecting their organizational mandate and priorities. Table 4.2 identifes in summary form the policy approaches and their underpinning key concepts, characteristic discourse(s) and exemplar initiatives and/or publications for eight IOs discussed in Section "Mapping the Population of International Organizations", namely: ILO, IOM, OECD, UNESCO, UNCTAD, World Bank, WHO and WTO. The table covers a long historical period; where applicable, it indicates any shift in approach and discourse of the IOs included in it. The WTO is bracketed here because although it has self-consciously abstained from this global policy feld on the grounds that it addresses mobility of labor, not migration, the applicability of GATS, although uncertain, cannot be excluded entirely (WHO/The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)/ WTO 2012). In any case, international services trade agreements in global policymaking in this feld (as in others) have been enduringly attractive to some global actors so it is important that the WTO be included even if it is presently a 'passive' actor.

Table 4.2 shows the breadth of policy concepts, approaches and discourses evident in this feld. These more or less clearly distinguish the IOs (columns 2 and 3) from one another, even though underpinning ideas such as the right to migrate, universal health coverage, ethical/fair recruitment and development benefts of migration are shared by them. However, these ideas are taken up and blended in quite different ways by different IOs. Among the UN agencies, the ILO, WHO, UNESCO and UNCTAD all subscribe to UN normative principles on human rights and equality, but each bring different perspectives that are, in turn, refected in their discourses. The ILO's approach is grounded in promoting the highest international labor standards possible and social protection systems consistent with them, and accordingly discusses health worker migration and recruitment in terms of working conditions in countries of origin and employment and as a matter of social (labor) injustice. WHO's approach is rooted in meeting essential health needs in line with realizing strengthened health systems and universal health coverage. Its discourse is rooted in health workforce planning and health professional workforces as part of the planning, policy and administration of health services more generally in order to meet population health needs and global health goals. UNESCO's approach has been to highlight the loss of national investment in education and human development that results from permanent emigration of highly skilled health workers especially to richer countries in the Global North. During the 1960s, it was the most vociferous of all the active IOs at the time in emphasizing the need for a robust *global* policy capable of addressing and stemming the 'brain drain'.


**Table 4.2** Policy approaches and discourses of IOs in regard to health worker migration/recruitment

(*continued*)


**Table 4.2** (continued)

Source: compiled using data from Yeates and Pillinger (2013, 2018, 2019a), with additional analysis by the authors for this chapter

Beyond these IOs, the policy issues are framed in quite different ways. UNCTAD's policy discourse stands out for framing international health worker migration as an issue of 'reverse' transfers of resources from developing to developed countries which, it has argued, is a refection of source countries' unequal positioning within the international trade and development system. Its interventions were signifcant at the time (during the 1960s–1980s) because they differed substantially from—and challenged the policy discourses of WHO, the ILO and UNESCO in locating the 'brain drain' in the context of uneven trade and development within the world system. UNCTAD was also signifcant for its pioneering (but ultimately doomed) global policy proposals to regulate and stem such resource fows through *global* fnancial restitution mechanisms. The trade/labor/ development nexus perspective has more recently been taken up by the World Bank, which frames the issue as a matter of harnessing international migration dynamics for national and international development, albeit only recently beginning to engage with health worker migration dynamics through the lens of services trade and, latterly, universal health coverage. Its keenest interest has been in diasporic aspects of socio-economic development, particularly migrant remittances as a source of development fnance, and in harnessing international services trade frameworks on a regional scale as a means of mobilizing labor and fnancial resources for regional (and national) economic development. With the very recent exception of WHO (WHO 2016), it has been the only IO which has an appreciable world-regional dimension to its policy discourse, which it has pursued largely through wider regional development initiatives. Indeed, world-regional social policy in the Caribbean, Africa and East/South-East Asia bear the imprint of World Bank encouragement of international trade in services approaches to health worker migration and recruitment policy which emphasize the value of temporary and circular migration of health (and other) workers to meeting the economic needs of countries (Yeates 2014; Yeates and Pillinger 2013, 2018).

Policy approaches and discourses, such as ethical recruitment, universal health coverage and so on, crosscut with those of 'brain drain', 'brain gain' and 'brain circulation' that transcend any one IO. These latter three concepts can be broadly demarcated over time. Thus, global policy discourses have shifted from emphasizing the loss of investment of public resources in human and wider development capacity of countries ('brain drain'), to emphasizing the benefts to source countries of their highly skilled labor emigrating to richer countries ('brain gain'), to emphasizing the 'win-win' outcomes for source and recruiting countries alike as a result of temporary migration implied by more 'free-fowing', 'circular' migration patterns ('brain circulation'). Even so, each of the IOs (and many INGOs) participate in these debates on quite different terms. These differences relate in turn to debates about the migration-development nexus that have become prominent in the global migration governance and policy feld over the last two decades. Such debates tend, however, to be conducted in rather abstract terms, rarely connecting to the actual labor and living conditions of migrants themselves. One concern is that the concept of 'brain circulation' (and of circular migration more generally) feeds into political movements challenging the right to migrants' permanent settlement overseas. Otherwise, the concept of 'brain circulation' is particularly associated with the GFMD, IOM and the World Bank diasporic approaches and circular migration discourses. There are signs it is being adopted by WHO as well. The ILO remains skeptical of circular migration because its precepts are very similar to temporary migration; encouraging such migration risks undermining permanent migration rights and labor rights and standards.

The delineations among the IO population identifed here have a material basis, connected as they are to the organizations' institutional mandates and governance structures. For example, the ILO's focus on labor migration and labor standards founded on non-discrimination (including on the basis of national origin) and human rights refects its institutional mandate to protect 'the interests of workers when employed in countries other than their own' (Preamble, ILO Constitution 1944). Its tripartite governance structure (governments, employers, workers) coupled with its institutional provisions for monitoring the implementation of its instruments have been important for propelling its mission to codify international standards and embed them institutionally at country level. WHO, on the other hand, has no institutional mandate on migration per se. Nevertheless, it has routinely encountered the phenomenon of health worker migration and recruitment since it earliest day by virtue of being tasked 'to promote improved standards of teaching and training in the health, medical and related professions' (Article 2) as part of its 'responsibility for the health of their peoples and the provision of adequate health and social measures' and overarching objective for 'all peoples [to attain] the highest possible level of health' (Article 1). This objective and responsibility is guided by the principle that '[u]nequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of disease…is a common danger' (WHO 1946), and opens the way to WHO's concern with how (in)adequately staffed health services combine with emigration in some country contexts. Unlike the ILO though, WHO is governed by member states (health ministries) via the World Health Assembly. Only member governments have 'proposal rights', and there is no constitutional duty, mandate or mechanism for formally incorporating non-state actors in its policy-formation process. Nor is there any means of monitoring the implementation of its instruments, save for what can be negotiated with governments and written into specifc agreements on a case-by-case basis (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, 29–30, 2019b).

The contrasting mandates and governance mechanisms differentially structure the participation and proposal rights of different actors (state, business and labor in the ILO, states in WHO), and produce varied institutional and political dynamics of IO policy formation (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, 29–30). The ILO's tripartite governance structure has proved more conducive in framing and propelling global policy than WHO's structure which limits participation rights to member state governments. Internal organizational features of IOs are also important in structuring other IOs' policy discourse (and by extension the pace and timing of policy and international agreements). For example, ideas and discourses revolving around 'reverse transfers of technology' at UNCTAD brought labor migration into capital mobility debates. This had the effect of highlighting how the international migration of highly skilled (health) personnel constitutes a one-sided transfer of productive resources embodying technology in human skills, as well as the economic development consequences of outfows of such resources from poorer to richer countries (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a). These creative opportunities to connect labor, trade and development in global policy during the 1970s in particular were enabled by UNCTAD's thirdworldist mandate to enhance the participation of developing countries into global trade and development policy. UNCTAD's policy-making structures, which involved grouping countries into distinct negotiating blocs (advanced economies, communist countries, developing countries), strengthened the voices of those highlighting the economic development impacts of (human) capital mobility. They also helped compensatory approaches to global policy on health worker migration and recruitment to be articulated in ways that, although controversial and despite not being instituted in practice, have remained an enduring idea within the feld since the 1960s (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a).

The range of policy concepts and discourses in this global policy feld is at least as diverse as that of the population of IOs and the networks and constituencies in which they are embedded—if not more so. The delineations set out in Table 4.2 are heuristic devices that help distinguish principal policy characteristics of the organizations concerned. These policy characteristics tend to be stable over time, even if the emphasis (e.g., through work programs) is refreshed periodically. There is strong continuity of the ILO policy in this feld, which has remained rooted in international labor standards and an appreciation of the multiple, intersecting social and economic policy sectors involved. There has also been continuity of WHO policy, which has remained grounded in essential health needs, universal health coverage and strengthened health systems. Yet these characteristics are not immutable; they change over time. New ideas are folded into organizational work programs, which may become institutionalized in policy. For example, WHO took up the idea of ethical recruitment in the mid-2000s and featured it in the 2010 Global Code. A similar process may be occurred in relation to gender equality, with WHO recently recognizing the need for gendered health workforce strategies (WHO/ GHWN/Women in Global Health (WGH) 2018), and in relation to temporary and circular migration (see footnote 3, above). The fundamental discursive characteristics remain stable but they evolve over time. Thus, what we see in current WHO discourse is continuity with older ideas of ethical recruitment, voluntary self-regulation and universal health coverage blending in its present-day focus on the benefts of temporary and circular migration. This is leading to a discursive shift in WHO (as with other IOs) away from 'brain drain' toward embracing 'brain circulation', with attendant consequences for global policy on migration more generally.

Nor are the policy characteristics of any one IO necessarily uniform at any one point in time. They may be articulated only in some parts of the world, as in the case of the World Bank's support for an international services trade policy approach in the Caribbean context but not, it seems, in other regional contexts. Is this simply a refection of creative opportunities available in the region to advance this agenda, such as resources and strategic priorities of the WB regional offce for Latin America, or of certain features of the region's history? IOs are large, complex, multi-faceted organizations spanning multiple country and regional contexts, each of which has its own histories, constellations of policy actors and 'stakeholders', and institutional landscapes. Moreover, multiple IOs are co-present in any different regional or country context, and so the constellations of global actors, drivers and politics of policy vary considerably at any one point in time. This raises an analytical (and methodological) question: What can be taken as IOs' defnitive policy position at any moment in time? Where do we 'look' to 'read' IO policy discourses? A reading of, say, ILO policy, with its codifed international labor standards, seems straightforward enough. But how and why is it that some regional offces of IOs seem to promote particular aspects of the organization's policy? In WHO's case, for example, its Europe and South-East Asia offces have been the most visibly active in implementing the WHO Global Code. Might we understand this apparent anomaly as qualifying the idea of a singular, overarching policy, as a refection of context-dependent resources, or as differences in leadership—or a combination of these? Finally, we should note that additional multilateral frameworks (and IOs) governing international health worker migration/recruitment also come into play. For example, in Asia Pacifc, ASEAN's approach allies most closely with that of the WTO (health migration and recruitment as a trade in services issue) (Yeates and Pillinger 2018). Regional-level IOs 'overlay' global-level ones, offering competing or complementary normative and policy frameworks conditioning the work of governments (and others). In Asia Pacifc, the ILO, WHO, the WB and so on sit alongside regional IOs, such as ASEAN, regional development banks and regional dialogic mechanisms for migration governance (Yeates and Pillinger 2018).

## Inter-actor Relationships of Cooperation, Coordination and Contestation

A relational approach to global policy development (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a) emphasizes that IOs do not work in isolation from each other or the wider global and national institutional and political felds in which they are embedded. As discussed in Section "Key Discourses Promulgated by IOs", there is much crossover among IOs' policy discourses, even if distinct policy approaches and IOs can be identifed. Indeed, global policy discourses are blended from multiple sources and, in turn, circulate among IOs and their constituencies. Considering these interactions, this section turns to consider further inter-IO relations of cooperation and contestation through the lens of the formal and informal partnerships they forge with one another. Indeed, partnerships are a key feature of how IOs relate to each other and other actors.

Inter-IO relations have been a feature of this global policy feld when it was substantially initiated and progressed within the UN system during the 1960s. These relationships, between the ILO, UNESCO, UNCTAD and WHO, seem to be ones of coexistence within the wider UN system. As separate (and relatively young) UN agencies, they were developing their programs in accordance with their organizational mandates and priorities in the context of a rapidly developing realm of action being carved out by the UN as a whole on a range of issues of interest—from international human rights instruments to the frst UN development decade program—to give tangible meaning to the UN overall mandate. A range of UN bodies besides the four major UN agencies were involved (e.g., United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), offce of the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG), UN Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology for Development, UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development, UN Institute for Training and Research, Commission for Social Development). Although these were essential in developing and approving UN agencies' policy initiatives within the wider UN system, by themselves they do not testify to specifc partnership relations among the agencies beyond the generality of common membership of the UN.

Partnership relations became more apparent in the 1970s, in the guise of informal cooperation between the ILO and WHO. WHO's major international study of international physician and nurse migration was curtailed early, and, with the prospects of the policy conclusions being incorporated into a WHO policy program rapidly diminishing, there was an opportunity to pass the 'baton' to the ILO, whose own employment program, which included a labor migration and gender equality strand, was being elaborated at the time. The ILO negotiated and concluded the Nursing Personnel Recommendation in record time. A representative of WHO was present at part of the passage of the Recommendation (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, 64–74). This is a good example of inter-IO cooperation, one that is all-the-more signifcant because the Recommendation was the frst multilateral agreement setting international standards on international health worker migration and recruitment.

Later decades provide more instances of inter-IO partnership working. These instances have increased in frequency since the 2000s as global social policy and development agendas have come together, frst around the MDGs (2000–2015) and later around the SDGs (2016–2030). Over the last two decades, engagement by multiple IOs in partnerships (or, at least, alliances) has been a defning discursive and institutional feature of this feld. This has been important given the multi-sectoral nature of the phenomenon. Indeed, such partnerships were key to the Global Code (WHO 2010), the international campaign for which involved an alliance between WHO, IOM and the ILO working within the multi-stakeholder Health Worker Migration Initiative (HWMI)4 and the high-level Global Policy Advisory Council (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b). Another example is the global Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth (HEEG 2016), whose recommendations to increase investment in highquality health jobs—rich economic growth strategies to underpin the SDGs (including health and health-related goals) were premised on cooperative and coordinated joint ILO-OECD-WHO work to address health worker shortages. This has been taken forward through the International Platform on Health Worker Mobility set up under the joint ILO-OECD-WHO *Working for Health* program and proposals to set up an international fund, the Working for Health Multi-Partner Trust Fund (MPTF), to support countries in expanding and transforming their health workforce (Dublin Declaration 2017). Questions here are whether these

<sup>4</sup>HWMI was established as a partnership between the NGO Realizing Rights: The Ethical Global Initiative and the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA) in 2006 in response to the heightened concerns about the need for global responses to health worker migration and recruitment and was a crucial actor during the negotiations (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, b).

initiatives are more than an umbrella for a division of specialist labor among the IOs, and whether they are leading not just to collaborative activities but to *coordinated* ones—and if so, how are concepts, discourses and structural authority and power being reconfgured?

Inter-IO partnership working has become integral to the present-day global policy feld, bringing much-needed multiple perspectives on the complex, multi-sectoral issues at hand, but such cooperation is not without tensions. We are not suggesting that IOs are pursuing parallel agendas within this joint global program of work, but competing policy approaches and discourses seem to be resilient—in no way subordinated or diluted under the banner of unity; still relatively fuid and in no way fxed or unchanging. One illustration of this is the Global Skills Partnerships initiative,5 which has gained some traction in recent years. Favored by the OECD (2018), for example, such partnerships are seen as a means to derive mutual beneft—a 'win-win' solution to reconciling the continuing need for highly skilled immigrant health workers with source countries' capacity to keep 'producing' health workers willing to emigrate. Global Skills Partnerships are also fagged in the Global Compact (UNGA 2018) (Art.33(e)) as a way to link migration and skills development for the mutual beneft of migrants, and source and destination countries.

These partnerships are mired in controversy though because there are concerns that they open paths to greater reliance on private fnancing for education and training and international trade in health services. There is also a great deal of uncertainty as to how they will fulfll their promise of *simultaneously* contribute to a net creation of health workers in the source country, mitigate the effects of health worker migration and prove an effective way of addressing health workforce availability and promoting health system sustainability. There are also unanswered questions about how they will ensure ethical recruitment and rights-based approaches to

5Global Skills Partnerships (GSPs) are essentially bilateral agreements that mobilize resources for the training of skilled health workers in source countries, equipping health workers with the relevant skills and visas to migrate to work for an agreed duration in the country of destination that funded their training. Such an agreement allows mutual gains by taking advantage of large international differences in both professional earnings and training costs (Clemens 2017, 1). Clemens' idea is that GSPs would be formed on the basis of bilateral agreements where destination country governments directly fund training and skills development programs prior to migration. He argues they avoid the loss of resources from source countries when a trained health worker migrates to work abroad on time-limited contracts, returning 'home' afterward.

migration (i.e., uphold the principles of the WHO Global Code). There are specifc concerns that they may further embed temporary and circular health worker migration schemes (and related quotas) rather than promote permanent migration and other rights-based approaches to migration established by the UN and the ILO (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a, 190–193). In terms of the present discussion about sources of tension and potential fracture in inter-IO relations, it is worth highlighting that the dominant discourse in relation to Global Skills Partnerships revolves around fnancial incentives, employability, skills transfer and mobility rather than around health systems strengthening, health systems sustainability, health equity, decent work and social protection. These discursive shifts signal a potential turn away from UN normative principles, insofar as the OECD and the WB are associated with the dominant discourse in relation to Global Skills Partnerships, and the ILO and WHO associated with the labor and health rights-based one. In these partnerships, alternative narratives among the IOs could signal fracture lines in the new politics of IO cooperation around the health workforce aspects of the global health goals (Yeates and Pillinger 2019a).

#### Conclusion

This chapter has examined constellations of global policy actors (principally IOs), as well as ideas and discourses in the global policy feld of health worker migration. Among the oldest post-WWII global social policy felds, the organizational center of gravity of this feld has lain within the UN system. From the outset, we see multiplicity in terms of the population of IOs and policy concepts, approaches and discourses. Nongovernmental IOs were limited to international workers' and employers' organizations. Ensuing decades have seen the continual participation of (especially) the ILO and WHO, the exit of UNESCO and UNCTAD from the feld, and the entry of the OECD, IOM and the World Bank and, prospectively, the WTO. UNICEF has never had a presence in the feld. Regional-level IOs have not been a central feature of this chapter, but there is evidence that they are an already-important part of the IO topography in this feld and that they may increase in signifcance in the future.

The ILO stands head and shoulders above other IOs for being the single most continuously present and active IO in the feld. Given the mandate and governance structure of the ILO, this also means that IOs of workers and employers are the most long-standing and active of all IOs in the policy feld. Since the 2000s, however, the population of nongovernmental IOs has expanded signifcantly, to the point that such actors extend well beyond workers' and employers' organizations. Their participation has added further perspectives and complexity, not least because these IOs are drawn from development, migration and health (and healthrelated) NGOs. A notable feature of this non-governmental population of IOs is the Global Health Workers Alliance (now Global Health Workers Network) which is unique in the feld. Inter-IO cooperation has long been evident in the feld and has intensifed in recent decades, notably since 2000 (corresponding with the MDGs), during which time those relationships have moved from informal partnerships to more formal ones.

Over this time, IOs' policy approaches have been stable, with competing (and sometimes complementary) emphases on labor standards, health services, diaspora engagement, economic development and trade. However, policy discourses have shifted considerably along many axes. Perhaps the most signifcant of these shifts revolves around the labor-migrationdevelopment nexus, as captured in the concepts of brain drain, brain gain and brain circulation. Ethical recruitment, mutual beneft and mobility (as distinct from migration) have become key policy concepts. The notion of depletion may be an emerging concept, paralleling ongoing preoccupations with, and anxieties about, 'shortages' and resource extractivism that international recruitment signifes. In some quarters, brain/care drain still has considerable purchase, even if it is seen as problematic by many.

The growth of inter-IO partnering in global policy development seems to correspond with accommodations of various kinds among IOs in the feld. Contemporary forms of inter-IO relationships oriented toward collaboration and cooperation have attenuated—but not eliminated—some historic tensions. In this respect, this chapter has pointed to emergent fracture lines in relation to Global Skills Partnerships, where predominant essential health needs and social protection approaches are being challenged by discourses of mobility (notably temporary and circular migration), fnancial incentives, employability and skills transfers.

This discussion ends on two points of critical refection. The frst concerns organizational ecology (cf Niemann et al, this volume). We highlighted the signifcance of both endogenous and exogenous organizational ecology in materialist understandings of global social policy formation in relation to any one IO. Internal governance structures determine global policy approaches as much as specifc initiatives, where the former tend to be enduring and structurally formative and the latter are battlegrounds over which competing policy approaches and discourses are fought out. We also highlighted the temporally and geographically contingent nature of this organizational ecology, which is fuid and varied rather than fxed and uniform. This points to the value of taking a broad view on what counts as an IO's exogenous organizational ecology rather than delimiting the view only to IOs directly and explicitly participating in the feld. The second point of refection relates to the levels metaphor used so often in global social policy and governance studies. The concept of scale, rather than level, may be a more pertinent one, because it brings us closer to a form of global social policy analysis cognizant of how IOs of many different kinds work across multiple spaces of transnational governance that, in turn, are dynamically interacting. An appreciation of organizational ecology and the interactions at once constituting and deriving from it should therefore encompass relations among populations of IOs *across* multiple scales. Constellations of actors, ideas and policies in the architecture of global social governance and policy will be context-specifc, that is formed from concrete situations circumstances, times and places.

#### References


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# International Organizations and the Global Social Governance of Pensions

*Martin Heneghan*

# Introduction

This chapter analyzes the role of International Organizations (IOs) in the global governance of pension policy. The primary purpose of a pension system is to provide income security in old age. A public pension system may seek to offer poverty relief by offering a pension beneft above the poverty line, with additional income in retirement coming from private savings. Public pension systems can also offer more comprehensive benefts, replacing a proportion of a person's income in retirement. The latter is obviously more expensive. In the developed world, most countries have close to universal pension coverage with expenditure across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) currently averaging 8.6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (OECD 2017). The precise balance between the state and the market varies from country to country. Within the average expenditure on pensions in the OECD there is a range of different expenditures. In contrast to the

M. Heneghan (\*)

School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: Martin.Heneghan@nottingham.ac.uk

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developed world, pension coverage in the developing world is patchier. For example, less than 30 percent of the population in Africa have some form of formal pension coverage (ILO 2017).

In addition to income security in old age, pension policies also have secondary objectives such as developing capital markets to enhance economic growth (Holzmann 1997) or as a way to manage unemployment during economic restructuring (Vanhuysse 2006). As the largest component of government expenditure, they are often a feature of any program aimed at reducing budget defcits or national debt (Güleç 2014). It is therefore no surprise that a number of IOs, beyond those primarily concerned with income protection in old age, have an interest in shaping the pension policies of national governments. The main debates have centered around whether pensions should be offered on a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) or a funded basis. PAYG pensions are where the current generation of workers fnances the current generation of pensioners through the tax system. A funded system involves individuals setting aside resources for retirement through savings in a private pension plan. A related debate is whether pensions should operate on a defned beneft (DB) or defned contribution (DC) basis. The former involves pensioners receiving a guaranteed proportion of their income in retirement. The latter entails the pension beneft being determined by the performance of the investment from the individual contribution. This transfers the risk to the individual (Barr 2001).

The analysis of the IO population here largely focuses on the International Labour Organization (ILO) and World Bank (WB), as each of these organizations has dominated the global discourse on pension reform at one time or another (Heneghan and Orenstein 2019). The role of the OECD and the European Union (EU) in shaping the pensions agenda through benchmarking is also highlighted. Their role has been more limited due to their smaller membership, but they have still made important contributions to global debates (Orenstein 2008). In addition, various United Nations (UN) agencies have been involved in the recent move toward national social protection foors, which includes pensions, adding more diversity and complexity to the feld of IOs involved in pensions (Deacon 2013). This chapter traces the entry of each organization into the feld of pensions by outlining the development of three distinct periods in the feld. It provides an overview of the IOs involved and the dominant discourses during each period.

# The Organizational Environment and the Intrinsic Features of IOs Involved in the Social Governance of Pensions

There are three distinct periods in the global social governance of pensions: the golden age of welfare (1945–1970s), the neoliberal era (1979–2008) and the post-global economic crisis era (2009 onward). Each period is characterized by the dominant economic paradigm which has shaped the discourse on pension provision. This paradigm forms the nature of the organizational environment, and in part, determines which actors become involved in the field (Heneghan and Orenstein 2019). This chapter demonstrates that shifts in the dominant global economic paradigm create the space for new IOs to enter the feld by providing expertise in line with the new zeitgeist.

In addition to the organizational environment, the unique features of each IO that populate the pension governance environment have shaped the nature of their involvement and the discourses they promote. Their intrinsic features have also determined their ability to respond to a changing environment. For instance, it will be shown that the tripartite nature of the ILO constrained its ability to react to the entry of the WB into the pension reform arena. Intrinsic features also determine the type of involvement an IO has and the nature of its discourse. For example, the WB and ILO have departments with the autonomy to promote specifc pension models. In addition, alongside the promotion of pension models they also offer technical assistance to reforming countries. The OECD and EU have a select membership and are therefore reluctant to promote a specific pension model. Instead, they use benchmarking and promote general principles through their cognitive authority (Ervik 2009).

Intrinsic features can determine which source of authority an IO will rely on as a form of social governance in the pensions feld. For example, as a bank, the World Bank is able to use its lending capacity to steer the policy agenda of national governments. During the 1980s, the reputation of the World Bank was damaged when—alongside the IMF—it used Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) as a form of conditionality in lending to developing countries. SAPs often involved ordering governments to reduce social expenditure as a way to reduce budget defcits and national debt. These policies proved to be widely unpopular and were abandoned by the World Bank in the 1990s (Stiglitz 2002). The World Bank now prefers to use persuasion rather than coercion as a tool of infuence (Béland and Orenstein 2013). In addition, IOs are cognizant of the effectiveness of countries owning their development agendas, rather than them being portrayed as protectionist measures of the global north (Deacon 2013). However, the Bank can still use its lending as an additional form of infuence. As will be argued, the World Bank was able to induce a number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe to adopt its pension model with the use of loans and technical assistance (Orenstein 2008; Appel and Orenstein 2013). Indeed, the level of indebtedness of a country was argued to be a key source of infuence for the World Bank in shaping pension reforms in the region (Müller 1999).

IOs also have power through their moral and cognitive or expert authority (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). The ILO relies largely on moral authority as a form of infuence through the soft law of conventions and recommendations. Using a language of universalism, national governments are compelled to sign up to ILO conventions and follow its recommendations to be a 'good global citizen.' The ILO has used a number of these legal instruments to steer pension policies. The moral authority of the ILO is enhanced by its policies which emerge as a consensus between each organ of its tripartite structure—national government representatives, employers' representatives and employees' representatives. In addition, all the IOs involved in global pension governance use their cognitive authority as a source of infuence (Orenstein 2008). They each lay claim to pensions expertise, which can compel states to follow their guidance. For example, the OECD produces in-depth reports on the national pension systems of its members in order to compare and contrast the pension systems in each country with the aim of infuencing reform through peer learning and emulation (Ebbinghaus 2015).

## The ILO and the Global Social Governance of Pensions During the Golden Era

The ILO has a long history of contributing to the development of pension policies and promoting the expansion of social insurance across the globe. It was an early adopter of the Atlantic Charter (1941) and a proponent of the Beveridge Report (1942), it initiated the Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944 and adopted the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, culminating in the formation of its own Convention 102 on Social Security in 1952. The ILO's pension policies historically consisted of three complimentary strands: the promotion of social security norms across the globe, a provider of technical assistance to countries designing a social security system and through the production of social security knowledge in the form of the *Costs of Social Security*, a key reference point in the feld.

Although founded in the aftermath of the First World War, it was while planning for peace at the end of the Second World War that the ILO cemented its position as a global actor in pension policies (Heneghan 2019). On May 10, 1944, while the war was still ongoing, the ILO's 26th International Labour Conference (ILC) in Philadelphia formally established the rights of every human being to social security. The Declaration of Philadelphia requires the ILO to promote the achievement of social security among the nations of the world. The conference was part of an emerging international consensus on the nature and principles of the political, economic and social reconstruction after the war, with the ILO part of a growing movement to foster peace and stability through the use of social policy (Esping-Andersen 1996).

The publication of the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom in 1942 recast the understanding of income security in old age, popularizing the expression "social security" (Parrott 1992). The ILO had been actively involved in the discussion and articulation of the report. Its core message of "freedom from fear and want" resounded with the desire of the ILO to create a new social settlement that would prevent the conditions for international confict. From a global perspective, the most important document in pension policy was the Declaration. It was incorporated into the ILO's constitution and formed the cornerstone of its activities in the decades that followed. It recognizes the:

solemn obligation of the International Labour Organisation to further among the nations of the world programmes which will achieve", among others, "the extension of social security measures to provide a basic income to all in need of such protection and comprehensive medical care. (ILO 1944a, Article III (f))

In order to achieve this aim, the Conference adopted two Recommendations, one on income security (Recommendation 67) (ILO 1944b) and one on medical care (Recommendation 69). Recommendations 67 and 69 paved the way for Convention 102 on Social Security (Minimum Standards) that followed shortly after in 1952. The Convention marked a step change in global social security policy, since it introduced the idea of a minimum level of social security that could be attained anywhere in the world (Cichon and Hagemejer 2007). It incorporated all the branches of social security, including old age security that had previously been dealt with in separate conventions and recommendations. Convention 102 moved on from defning the classes of people that ought to be protected and instead argued that a specifc percentage of the population be covered.

In the years that followed, the ILO set about promoting social security through conferences, the creation of reform templates and the dispatching of consultants. The activities of the ILO were instrumental in the spreading of pension ideas across the globe. In the immediate years after the Declaration most Latin American countries had adopted a pension system by the end of the 1940s. Caribbean countries followed suit in the 1950s and 1960s, with the majority of African countries following later in the 1960s and 1970s (Orenstein 2003).

The Declaration of Philadelphia was the frst in a number of international legal instruments that have sought to install social security as a right to every human being. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly included social security among the rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948). This text was drafted by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 1966, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights also recognized the rights of everyone to social security (ICESCR 1966). This right to social security formed a central component of the post-war consensus to foster peace and stability. The golden age entailed a considerable expansion of public pension provision across the globe. The consensus on the role of the state in providing income protection in old age would last until the crisis of the Keynesian economic model led to a sustained global challenge to the role of the state in the economy and in society (Table 5.1).

#### The Neoliberal Economic Order

The elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980 helped usher in a new economic paradigm. Inspired by Friedrich Hayek (1976) and Milton Friedman (1977), a challenge was mounted against the principles that had underpinned the global economy. These new principles would transform the global discourse on pensions by having an impact on the approach of the World Bank, the OECD and the EU in their pension advocacy.


**Table 5.1** A mapping of IO involvement and the discourses on pension provision 1945–1979

The privatization of Chile's pension system in 1981, under the authoritarian leadership of Augustus Pinochet, was held up as a beacon for all pension systems by neoliberal policy entrepreneurs. It had been designed by a group of radical reformers nicknamed the 'Chicago Boys'. These had studied under the tutelage of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and upon their return to Chile, based themselves at the Pontifcal Catholic University of Chile. This institution was the laboratory for a number of neoliberal experiments, of which the most radical was the complete privatization of the public pension system (Borzutzky 2005). The privatization involved diverting pension contributions from taxpayers into individual fully funded pension accounts (IFAs). This represented a signifcant redrawing of the social contract: from the state to the market and from a collective to individual responsibility. From the mid-1980s up until the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the Chilean economy grew at an average annual rate of 7.2 percent (Büchi 2006). The impressive performance of the economy was argued in part to be a result of the development of the capital market the pension privatization had stimulated (Holzmann 1997; World Bank 1994). The Chilean experience would be a constant reference point for organizations that wanted to privatize pension provision.

#### *The OECD and Pensions*

It was during this period that the OECD began to focus on pension issues (Walker 1990). Its impact was not as far-reaching as the ILO's and did not have the capabilities to be as active as the World Bank in promoting pension privatization. Where the ILO and later the World Bank promoted a message across the globe, the OECD's message was targeted at its members, which consist of the world's most developed nations. Nevertheless, the OECD used its ability to produce authoritative statistical information on pension systems to advocate a shift toward privately funded pensions. In the late 1980s, the OECD began to produce reports on demographic aging and reforms to public pensions (OECD 1988, 2000). These reports built upon earlier critiques of the welfare state from the OECD with an explicit focus on population aging and its implications for the welfare state. By 2000, the OECD was calling for more pension diversifcation as a way to make public pension systems more sustainable (OECD 2000).

The entry of the OECD into the traditional domain of the ILO wrongfooted the Geneva-based institution during a period of global upheaval. The intrinsic features of the ILO prohibited a robust response to the OECD's critique of the welfare state. The parallel goals of defending and expanding the welfare state in the developed world while building new systems in the developing world stretched the resources of the ILO. The OECD only had to focus on the former. In addition, the ILO was caught up in Cold War tensions between the developed and developing world. It would lead to the United States leaving the organization, cutting its budget by a quarter. The ILO was dealing with considerable internal upheaval just as a rival IO was moving into its traditional feld of expertise and infuence.

The main contribution of the OECD into the global social governance of pensions has been discursive. It was the frst IO to forcefully promote a message that the welfare state was in crisis. It used its expert authority to shift the focus from purely public provision and add to a growing global concern over the sustainability of pension systems and the desirability of diversifcation. The OECD laid the groundwork for the World Bank to enter the pension reform arena for a message that went beyond the 'rich countries club' of the OECD to the Eastern bloc and the Global South.

#### *The World Bank Enters the Field*

The collapse of the communist system in Central and Eastern Europe drew the World Bank into the global pensions feld. The twin transformation from socialism to market-based capitalism and from authoritarianism to democracy had never been undertaken before. The region was heavily dependent on the expertise of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) (Roaf et al. 2014). It was also starved of capital, which gave the IFIs signifcant leverage over the reform agenda in the new market economies (Müller 1999). Central and Eastern Europe was uniquely susceptible to neoliberal policy prescriptions given its recent experience with communism. The region was also keen to signal its neoliberal fervor to international investors.

In addition to the susceptibility to neoliberalism and IFI advice, the transformation also had signifcant consequences for its pension systems. As large sectors of the economy became redundant in the shift away from a planned economy, the pension system was used as a de facto unemployment beneft (Vanhuysse 2006). This led to a sharp increase in the number of pensioners and a subsequent increase in pension expenditure. For example, pension expenditure in Poland reached 15.9 percent of GDP in 1995 (Góra and Rutkowski 2000). This brought pension reform onto the agenda in Central and Eastern Europe (Müller 2003).

Advising middle-income countries with such large pension expenditure was a new experience for the Bank. The publication of *Averting the Old Age Crisis* in 1994 (*Averting* hereafter) represented its formal response to t1he pension systems of the new post-socialist landscape it was now actively involved in. Its core message was that—due to population aging—public pension systems in the developed world were unsustainable and that every country needed to diversify pension provision through mandatory private savings pillars. Figure 5.1 shows the proposed pension model which entailed three pillars. A public pillar concerned solely with poverty relief, a mandatory private pillar to smooth consumption over the life course and a voluntary pillar for additional savings for those who want a larger income in retirement.

*Averting* built upon the message on population aging propagated by the OECD and targeted it at developing countries by arguing that most of the growth in the world's old age population would be in developing countries (World Bank 1994, 28). On page one it issues a stern warning to developing countries not to follow the lead of developed countries:

**Fig. 5.1** The pillars of old age income security. (Source: World Bank 1994, 15)

At the same time, many developing countries are on the verge of adopting the same programs that have spun out of control in middle-income and high-income countries. (World Bank 1994, 1)

The message on public pension provision was that it required high taxes, which distort labor markets, that in developing countries it was regressive as it redistributed from the poor to the rich, and that it was vulnerable to political manipulation. Meanwhile, private provision was argued to not distort labor markets as it entailed private saving, could produce a more generous pension as returns on investments were greater than economic growth, it was free from political manipulation and could enable developing countries to develop their capital markets.

It was a message that proved to be controversial both inside and outside of the Bank. However, its intrinsic features allowed this particular message to prevail over rival ideas. The World Bank Group consists of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) which lends to middle-income and developing countries at preferential rates and the International Development Association (IDA) which offers grants to the world's poorest countries. In addition, the World Bank Group is also made up of the International Financial Corporation (IFC) which is concerned with private sector development. The latter arm of the Bank has signifcant leverage over policy development.

The *Averting* team came into confict with consultants in the Eastern European Division who favored parametric reforms to the pension systems of Central and Eastern Europe, such as raising the retirement age and contributions to make the system more sustainable (Barr 1994). However, the team behind *Averting* had powerful support in the form of the fnancial market sector at the IFC which favored *Averting*'s proposal as it offered the chance to develop capital markets in the new market economies of Central and Eastern Europe. With the internal dispute won by the *Averting* team it was able to take a coherent message to the rest of the world (Heneghan and Orenstein 2019). Despite its origins in the transitions taking place in Central and Eastern Europe, the message of *Averting* was aimed at developing countries warning them not to make the mistakes of the developed economies and to only promise modest pension benefts in old age. Its message was therefore far more infuential than the message of the OECD which focused its critique on the mature welfare states of its members. The World Bank, in contrast, was seeking to limit the size of developing countries' welfare states before they even existed. Its campaign was highly successful. It led a coalition including the Cato Institute, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the pensions industry, persuading 30 countries to adopt its model (Orenstein 2011).

#### *The Response of the ILO*

The entry of a new powerful IO—with considerable resources—into the pensions feld spooked the ILO. However, its intrinsic features precluded a formal response (Table 5.2).

The Social Security Department was vehemently opposed to the propositions and policy prescriptions of *Averting*. Its initial response was lowkey in the form of a journal article in conjunction with the International Social Security Association (ISSA) (Beattie and McGillivray 1995). Yet it was unable to mount a serious challenge to the Bank because other constituents within the ILO's tripartite governing structure were sympathetic to the message of *Averting*, like the employers' representatives, particularly after lobbying from representatives of the FIAP—International Federation of Pension Funds Administrators. In addition, other constituents were fully supportive of the message in *Averting* as their countries were adopting the same reforms, such as the Latin American bloc of countries. It would not be until 2000 that the ILO would produce a formal response and by this point it seemed to have largely accepted the message from *Averting* (Gillion et al. 2000).


**Table 5.2** A mapping of IO involvement and the discourses on pension provision 1979–2000

#### *The ILO Changes Direction*

The dominance of the World Bank in the pensions arena forced the ILO to retreat from defending the public pension systems it had promoted. As a reaction to losing its primary role in their promotion, it shifted focus to the developing world where the prevalence of informal labor markets meant that many of the world's poorest had no pensions coverage at all (Reynaud 2005). The ILO launched a campaign to extend coverage to everyone. The theme of its 2001 International Labour Conference was "Extending Social Security to all." The main conclusion from the session was "highest priority should go to policies and initiatives to extend social security to those who have none" (ILO 2001, v). After a protracted internal debate, the ILO settled on the idea of a national social protection foor as its fagship policy (Deacon 2013). A social protection foor entails a minimum level of income security (including pensions) and access to healthcare.

The campaign for social protection foors was both an internal one, within the ILO, and a wider global campaign. The external campaign began before the social foor was offcial ILO policy. In 2007, the Director of Social Security at the ILO, Michael Cichon, convened a meeting with representatives from United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs (UNDESA), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and HelpAge International (HAI). The meeting formalized the *Coalition for a Global Social Floor*. It sought to be a steering committee to bring together a movement for social protection foors under the UN umbrella. It was established in the context of debates around a fairer globalization and global inequalities. In addition, these debates were taking place in parallel with the positive experiences of modern forms of universal social policy in the Global South, such as the conditional cash transfer programs being rolled out in Latin America (Huyse 2017).

#### *Internal Disputes at the Bank*

By the mid-2000s the World Bank was shifting to a more nuanced position on multi-pillar pension reforms. Its intrinsic features allow for internal policy evaluations which can alter policy. Béland and Orenstein (2013) argue that the World Bank is an open system which allows for the contestation of ideas. The challenge to its model frst came in the form of a provocative presentation paper titled *Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths About Social Security Systems* and co-authored by its Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz. Here they highlighted a number of micro, macro and political economy assumptions in *Averting*, which they claimed to be false. Further criticism from within the Bank came from a volume titled *Keeping the Promise of Latin America* (Gill et al. 2005)*.* This brought attention to the poor coverage in Latin America and exorbitant fees for private pension pillars. The following year, more criticism of the World Bank's pension policy came from a formal internal evaluation, echoing other critiques. In addition, it claimed the benefts of the policy had been oversold and not enough attention had been given to initial conditions before advising reform (Independent Evaluation Group 2006). However, a defense of *Averting* was published in the form of an updated volume by the Director of Social Protection and Labor in the Bank (Holzmann and Hinz 2005). This volume defended the principle of pension diversifcation through a multi-pillar system. Yet, developments in the approach of the Bank pointed to a greater role for the state in providing poverty relief to the lifetime


**Table 5.3** A mapping of IO involvement and the discourses on pension provision 2000–2009

poor. In that sense it began the process of the World Bank beginning to focus on coverage through the public system, rather than diversifcation through privatization (Table 5.3).

# The Global Economic Crisis and Its Impact on the Global Pension Environment

At the onset of the global economic crisis, most countries that had adopted the World Bank's multi-pillar pension reforms either halted them, drastically reduced the private element or completely abandoned them. This was largely a result of the fscal implications of implementing a multi-pillar reform (Orenstein 2011; Sokhey 2017). As a result, the crisis signifcantly altered the IO global social governance environment of pensions. It had the twin impact of damaging the expert authority of the World Bank and allowed the ILO to reassert itself into the pensions debate.

Beginning with the ILO, the immediate post-crisis era of cooperation between the nation states that comprise the G20 had implications for the Geneva-based organization. Internally, the crisis helped to create a consensus for the ILO's fagship policy of national protection foors. It was formalized with the passing of Recommendation 202 by the ILC in 2012. On old age income security, the social protection foor policy states that:

all residents in old age and all residents with a disability to the extent that it excludes them from gainful activity enjoy income security at least at a nationally defned minimum level, through benefts in cash or in kind for old age and disability. (ILO 2011, 21)

Externally, as governments around the world intervened in their economies to stimulate aggregate demand in the economy and rescue insolvent banks, the role of social security as an automatic stabilizer in the macro economy was highlighted (IILS 2011). As a result of this, the ILO was invited to the top table of governance at the G20 to report on how its role could be broadened across the globe to embed its stabilizing function in the global economy (Deacon 2013).

In light of the crisis, the UN developed a series of coordinated responses to secure economic recovery and better protect the world's population against a future downturn (Deacon 2013). The Social Protection Floor Initiative (SPF-I) was developed by the Chief Executives Board of the UN (UNCEB). Its aim was to explore methods for IOs to support countries that wanted to expand social protection in their societies. It was to be chaired by the ILO and World Health Organization (WHO) with responsibilities divided between the ILO focusing on income security (including old age security) and the WHO focusing on basic healthcare provision. The SPF-I invited the former president of Chile (Michelle Bachelet) to write a report on social protection foors. Its publication in 2011 coincided with the French Presidency of the G20. Nicholas Sarkozy was sympathetic to the idea of a social protection foor which helped to keep it on the G20 policy agenda. The Bachelet Report called for a formal interagency development board to coordinate the disparate activities on social protection. This was heeded by the G20 as the Development Working Group set up the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B). This board is chaired by the ILO and World Bank and meets biannually to coordinate strategies to expand social protection coverage to the developing world.

The crisis also created the conditions for the World Bank to abandon its campaign for pension privatization and work much more closely with the ILO to focus more exclusively on social pensions in the developing world. The impact of the crisis on pension funds was almost immediate, with US\$5 trillion dollars wiped off pension assets in the early crisis period (Keeley and Love 2010). This damaged the performance of the fedgling pension systems of Central and Eastern Europe just as the frst benefciaries from the World Bank-led reforms were due to draw a pension. This gave domestic opponents of the pension system ammunition to attack the desirability of the reforms.

The fscal impact of the crisis was an even greater blow to the World Bank's pension model. The early Keynesian activism of national governments gave way to fscal conservatism as the crisis rolled on. Balancing budget defcits became the central target of policy makers as an era of austerity took hold and markets turned on the countries of Southern Europe for their debt levels. This had important implications for the pension systems of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The partial privatization of the pension system involved diverting contributions that previously went to the PAYG public pillar into individually funded accounts. This left a funding defcit in the public pillar—a transition cost to pay the current generation of retirees' pensions. The transition costs were signifcant and primarily fnanced by borrowing. For example, the transition costs in the pension system in Poland were as high as 1.8 percent of GDP (Bielawska et al. 2016).

A further complication was the role of the EU in the governance of the Central and Eastern European pension systems. Like the OECD, the EU does not promote a global pension model, its membership is limited by geography and its members have a broad range of pension systems. Similar to the OECD, its governance of pensions has implications beyond its members. In the late 1990s, the EU became increasingly involved in pension policy for a similar reason to the OECD—its impact on the wider macro economy. This was given further impetus in the Lisbon process which had explicit goals for raising the employment of older workers (Ebbinghaus 2015). The main form of governance is 'soft governance' whereby the EU produces common indicators and benchmarks—through its open method of coordination—with the aim of countries learning from each other, with emulation driving a process of convergence. However, it is within the fnancial constraints placed on members of the European Monetary Union (EMU) where the EU had an indirect but signifcant impact on global pension policy.

The accession of Central and Eastern European countries into the EU meant they were bound by the Maastricht Criteria on government borrowing. This stipulates that EU member states cannot run budget defcits larger than 3 percent of GDP and national debt must be below 60 percent of GDP. This made reversing the World Bank's pension model politically attractive. The poor performance of the pension funds had generated dissent. Renationalizing the pension system had the beneft of immediately reducing the defcit by diverting the private contributions back into the public pillar. Moreover, renationalizing the system meant the government was able to seize the accumulated pension assets. For example, in the case of Hungary, this entailed the national debt reducing by 10 percent of GDP overnight (Simonovits 2011).

As country after country reversed the World Bank's pension model it signifcantly dented the reputation of the World Bank as an expert authority on pensions. In addition, the Bank had also lost its leverage in Central and Eastern Europe as the region was no longer dependent on its fnance. The region's integration into the global economy meant that it had access to other sources of fnance, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). As a result of waning infuence in the region and across other middle-income countries, demand for World Bank pension assistance now primarily comes from developing countries. These countries have very different needs and are more likely to require assistance with designing a public pension system to provide poverty relief.

The failure of the World Bank's multi-pillar model—particularly in the post-communist countries where it was heavily involved—alongside a demand for the World Bank to assist in extending pension coverage has meant the alignment of the ILO and World Bank agendas.1 The World Bank has adopted the language promoted by the ILO on social protection foors and its primary purpose in the feld now is to expand the coverage of social protection in the developing world. The ILO was successful in its efforts to infuence the UN Sustainable Development Agenda (Huyse 2017). This agenda will largely determine the orientation of developmentrelated resources both globally and nationally. After lobbying by the ILO, social protection was integrated into 5 of the 17 sustainable development goals (Huyse 2017). This means that social protection is now a key focus of the development agenda for many years to come. Notably, goal 1.3

<sup>1</sup>Despite this alignment, the ILO published a scathing critique of the World Bank's pension model in late 2018 in its evaluation of the pension privatization campaign, labeling it a failure (Ortiz et al. 2018).

explicitly mentions social protection foors. It culminated in the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection announced at the UN General Assembly in 2016, which is to be jointly developed by the ILO and World Bank.

The current global social governance of pensions is characterized by cooperation between the two major IOs in the feld. They jointly chair the SPIAC-B which has coordinated social protection policy including pensions. One of the major outcomes of the board to date has been the production of a set of practical tools that help countries improve their social protection system by analyzing its strengths and weaknesses and offering policy options for further action. This toolkit was jointly developed by the World Bank, ILO, OECD, EU, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW), UNICEF and a number of bilateral donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This type of tool characterizes the nature of global social governance in pensions. Although the World Bank and ILO will still assist individual countries with their pension reforms, the global debate takes place largely within the broader social protection agenda. This means a number of additional IOs, such as the ones listed above, have been loosely drawn into the feld of pensions.

The analysis for this chapter has largely focused on activity at the headquarters of the IOs involved. Further research is needed in feld offces where there is considerable discretion and autonomy. This may be consequential because though both the World Bank and ILO use a similar discourse on social protection, key differences in interpretation remain. In particular, the interpretation of the term universal is contested. For the World Bank it simply means everyone having some form of coverage, for the ILO it means everyone having the same coverage. This means that previous debates on the role of means-testing may resurface. In a recent report, the World Bank (2018, 83) argued that means-testing was more effective at reducing poverty in old age social pensions. For now, the rolling out of coverage to those who have none fosters close collaboration between the two organizations, since both are primarily focused on creating coverage. However, these differences in interpretation and orientation may have implications for activities in the feld (Table 5.4).


**Table 5.4** A mapping of IO involvement and discourses on pension provision 2009 onward

#### Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the global social governance of pensions undertaken by IOs. It has shown how the feld has been characterized by both contestation and cooperation between the two main IOs in the feld. It is clear that major shifts in the global economic paradigm have been the main driving force for change in the organizational environment of IOs in the feld. It has allowed new actors such as the World Bank to enter the feld and also determined the varying power of the ILO in having infuence over the international agenda. In addition to the two main actors in the feld, the chapter has also demonstrated the partial roles played by other powerful IOs in shaping the discourse, including the role of the EU in undermining the multi-pillar pension model in Central and Eastern Europe—the region that was most associated with wholeheartedly embracing the message of the World Bank on pension provision. How IOs respond to this changing environment has also been shown to be determined in part by their intrinsic features. These features can act as a constraining force, which was the case with the ILO. In addition, the intrinsic features of the organization may allow for policy debate that can lead to shifting positions on the policy stance of the organization.

#### References

Appel, Hilary, and Mitchell A. Orenstein. 2013. "Ideas Versus Resources Explaining the Flat Tax and Pension Privatization Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union." *Comparative Political Studies* 46 (2): 123–152.


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# Family and Education

# Governing Children's Rights in Global Social Policy—International Organizations and the Thin Line Between Child Protection and Empowerment

*Anna Holzscheiter*

# Introduction—Locating Children's Rights in Global Social Governance1

Without doubt, the protection, welfare and well-being of children lie at the heart of social policy, domestically and in global governance. Both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and, to a lesser extent, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mirror the particular vulnerability and needs of children in the areas of international development cooperation they focus on. Children constitute a group that is most relevant to some of the core areas of social policy, such as education, social welfare and healthcare—particularly for very young children (i.e. immunization

<sup>1</sup> I thank Martha van Bakel for invaluable research support in writing this chapter.

A. Holzscheiter (\*)

Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: anna.holzscheiter@tu-dresden.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 139

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_6

regimes). The centrality of child welfare in (global) social policy, however, is poorly refected in the social policy literature which pays little attention to this specifc age group (Yeates 2014) or reduces relevant social policies to child abuse, child poverty and child labor (Yeates and Holden 2009). It is, thus, all the more important to include children and their rights in a compendium on global social governance.

Despite the centrality of children in (global) social policy, any attempt to discuss children's rights in light of global social governance will inevitably have to address that global social policies targeting children and their social environment are situated in a feld of tension. The tension lies between traditional child protection approaches, which are based on an assessment of children's (special) needs, and more progressive approaches, which recognize children's rights as human rights and refect the changing legal status of the child in international politics. To think of global social policy under the rubric of 'children's rights' thus implies a changing status of children as a sociopolitical group in global governance. This status is associated with rising claims on behalf of children (or by children themselves) for equality and social justice, a turning-away from primarily needsbased approaches to child protection and a stronger focus on the participation of children and youth in the making, implementation and assessment of global social policy. Consequently, any discussion of child protection and children's rights in the context of global social policy will have to address fundamental questions that have confronted national and international law and the politics of children's rights for a long time: How to resolve the numerous conficts of (best) interest and rights between children, their parents or guardians, and public authorities as they are refected, for example, in public discourses on abortion, child custody or child abuse and neglect?

Global child rights governance—also in its narrower focus on social issues and policies such as health, housing, food security, social benefts or education—has been evolving toward a feld of global governance marked by a growing visibility of children and stronger claims for social justice made on their behalf, or sometimes even directly made by children themselves. Thus, this contribution will not only address how international organizations have seized and 'governed' matters of child protection and child rights in their activities—it will also place these activities in the context of an increasing recognition of children's social, political and economy agency and, as a consequence, in the context of claims toward more direct and meaningful involvement of children as "affected persons" of social policy in international organizations (Holzscheiter 2018).

Children's rights in contemporary international politics are comprised of a mixture of general human rights principles and specifc rights tailored to the unique needs and situation of human beings below 18 years of age. In global politics, those rights are anchored in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC or CRC), which was adopted in 1989 by the UN General Assembly and which, in its 41 substantive articles, comprises rights from all generations and 'classes' of human rights, spanning civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights. While global social governance for children's rights (as part of a broader child rights regime) is composed of a whole array of international rules, organizations and collaborative structures, the UNCRC certainly constitutes the backbone of and core normative reference in international social policymaking relevant to children.

In its widely noted General Comment No. 5 on the General Measures of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the CRC has underlined the four general principles or pillars underlying a contemporary understanding of children's rights: children's right to life and survival; the principle of the best interests of the child; the child's right to be heard; and non-discrimination (Committee on the Rights of the Child 2003). These principles refect the special vulnerability of children and they are of immediate relevance to global social governance. Thus, global social governance geared toward children's rights applies to areas that are concerned with the survival and well-being of children, takes into account the best interests of the child, ensures that children are being granted possibilities to articulate their viewpoints and interests, and makes certain that children are not discriminated against in social policy—neither on the basis of their age nor on the basis of the many other potential reasons for discrimination such as sex, color, political opinion, national origin, disability, religion and so forth.

As I argue in this chapter, thinking about global social governance in terms of children's rights rather than child protection necessitates paying heed to all types of human rights, not just privileging social and economic rights. This is because the changing status of the child in international law toward a holder of rights also has profound implications for addressing questions of equality and social justice. The ensuing discussion of core actors, actor constellations, discourses and 'leitmotifs' in global social policy on children's rights will demonstrate three things: frst, a constant broadening of the 'catalogue' of social policy issues considered relevant for ensuring the well-being of and adequate living conditions for children. The idea that children are bearers of human rights has thus dislocated childhood from a narrow, traditional social policy agency focusing on health, social security, education, housing, childcare, labor and food security toward more fundamental social questions such as discrimination (i.e. gender, age), social exclusion, inequality and (distributive) justice, including intergenerational justice.2 Second, the contribution aims to highlight the implications of reconsidering more traditional, protectionist and objectifying approaches toward children in the context of changing interpretations of children's rights, particularly for global social governance. Third, the chapter exposes the centrality of the United Nations and its various specifc organizations—particularly those active in development cooperation—in addressing and implementing child rights norms in global social governance. As the discussion below will show the 'moral authority' of the United Nations in the area of child rights is grounded in the circumstance that the UNCRC serves as the focal legal and normative reference for virtually all organizations aiming to become more child rights-oriented in social policymaking and implementation. However, the chapter also discusses how global and regional organizations focused on social policy beyond the UN relate to child rights in their organizational philosophies and practical activities. Such a broadening of the IO population beyond the United Nations allows us to portray global social governance related to 'children's rights' as a contested space in which neither the meaning of 'children's rights' nor the necessity of prioritizing the 'child rights' lens or 'frame' in social policy are undisputed.

# The History of Children's Rights in International Organization and Law

Social policy with regard to children and the increasing global governance of childhood as a separate sphere of international cooperation has quite a long history. This history is marked by three distinct, coevolving processes: frst, the gradual segregation of childhood as a distinct sphere of social life and the dissociation of childhood from sites that became associated with adults (work, street, factory); second, an increasing awareness of universal childhood experiences emerging from new academic sub-disciplines such as pediatrics, pedagogy or developmental psychology; and third, related to

<sup>2</sup> See contributions on education (Niemann and Martens), disability (Schuster and Kolleck), health (Kaasch), food (Wolkenhauer) in this volume.

these two processes, a steadily growing internationalization of childhood, refected in a diversifcation of international legal rules, institutions and policies specifcally targeting children and adolescents. In the context of these three large processes, the meaning of 'children's rights' in domestic and international politics has considerably changed and expanded.

In 1973, Hilary Rodham (now Clinton) famously related to children's rights as a "slogan in search of a defnition" (Rodham 1973, 487). As much as the contours of children's rights have become more defned since then, they continue to be appropriated by a diverse array of actors and often refect quite different approaches toward the well-being of children. Not surprisingly, childhood constitutes a much-contested concept, laden with conficting ideologies and values—and also an object of reference onto which very diverse social and moral expectations are projected (Rizzini 2001, 315). Revisiting twentieth-century child protection policies and debates in international politics, it is clear that despite a terminology of 'children's rights', discourses on children and childhood were, for a long time, dominated by paternalistic, objectifying perspectives that presented children as inherently irrational, innocent, vulnerable and mute (Holzscheiter 2010). It was only in the second half of the twentieth century and, particularly, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s—with new perspectives on children in sociology, psychology and pedagogy—that children's rights were no longer exclusively couched in a language of 'salvation' and benevolence. Rather, it was possible to observe a shift in concern for protecting children to a concern for protecting their rights (Freeman 1983, 18). However, while debates became gradually infused with a new terminology of children's rights as legal claims rather than moral goods, international law and policies still refect a tension between a child rights perspective on child well-being on the one hand and a needsbased perspective on the other (McGillivray 1997, 14).

With the adoption of the UNCRC and its clear defnition of children as all human beings between 0 and 18 years of age, international law and politics on children's rights expanded toward adolescence as a legal gray zone. As I discuss further in later sections of this contribution, the intricacies associated with including adolescents or quasi-adults in an international child rights regime are only unsatisfactorily and artifcially 'resolved' by maintaining separate international rules and institutions for children and youth. At the same time, the drafters of the UNCRC sought to incorporate a certain fexibility in this treaty by introducing the idea or 'formula' of children's evolving capacities, that is, their gradually increasing capacity to make informed judgments, articulate their viewpoints and become independent rights-holders (Holzscheiter 2010; Hammarberg 1990). This new identity of the child in international law is most strikingly expressed in Article 12 of the Convention: "States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child." The contemporary children's rights regime anchored in the CRC thus captures an image of the child as maturing toward a competent social, political and economic human being. In the following sections, I will discuss the historical evolution of children's rights in the context of global social policies.

#### *Children's Rights and the Recognition of Children's Vulnerability and Special Status*

The growth in specifc legal provisions, policies and organizations addressing children in international politics paralleled a general trend in international law-making in the second half of the twentieth century. The history of international organizations, particularly after 1945, is also a history of the growing recognition of the special vulnerabilities of specifc groups such as women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrant workers or people living with disabilities—and their need for protection. It is in the context of this dynamic that children were also becoming a group that was granted specifc rights, with more and more international organizations creating specifc departments for child-focused activities or even special international programs catering to the situation of children, such as the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, for example.3

Historically, international legislation targeting children specifcally could be found in international human rights law, humanitarian law and labor law (van Bueren 1998, xix). After 1945, the creation of special funds and programs, most notably the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), but also the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), resulted in a signifcant expansion of child-focused activities, especially in the context of development cooperation. It is also in these areas that social policy activities of international organizations were becoming increasingly justifed and extended with reference to child rights principles.

<sup>3</sup>Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, see: https://www.who.int/ pmnch/en/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

# Early Global Social Policy for Children: International Cooperation on Economic and Sexual Exploitation

Among the earliest provisions dealing with child-specifc issues were those that targeted labor, traffcking and humanitarian law. In fact, the frst international treaties explicitly including children in their scope were those that addressed exploitation, either in the context of labor regulations or in the context of slavery. In 1904, an International Agreement for the Suppression of the "White Slave Traffc" was adopted by the International Conference on Traffc in Women and Children based in Paris, dealing explicitly with children as traffcked persons (Marshall 1999, 112). Some years later, the League of Nations covered the same issue area by an International Convention for the Suppression of Traffc in Women and Children (1921) and the Slavery Convention (1926). Equally important for global social governance was Convention No. 5 on the minimum age for employment, which fgured among the frst Conventions formulated by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and was adopted at the ILO's very frst session in 1919. The ILO Convention No. 5 prohibits the work of children under the age of 14 in industrial establishments. Further ILO Conventions regulating child labor were added in 1973 when the ILO reformulated the Minimum Age Convention, adopting Convention 138 concerning the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment. The new Convention 138, which supplements Convention 5, in fact obliged States Parties to fx a minimum age for admission to employment and work and to pursue a national policy designed to guarantee the effective abolition of child labor. It was, however, specifcally in the context of ILO Convention No. 198 on the 'Worst Forms of Child Labour' that the tensions inherent to the children's rights regime under the UNCRC became acutely visible. This had a lasting and rather confictual impact on the relationship between transnational child worker associations advocating for child participation and recognition of children as social and economic agents on the one hand, and traditional, protective, abolitionist international organizations and actors advocating for the widest abolition of child labor possible on the other hand.

### Gender, Girls and Global Social Policy

It was in the context of discussions on prohibiting child marriage that gender issues and the 'girl child' emerged for the frst time in the United Nations. In 1963, the UN adopted a Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages which foresaw that children should neither be allowed nor coerced to marry, working toward "eliminating completely child marriages and the betrothal of young girls before the age of puberty" (Rosenblatt 2000, 187). On a more general level, it was of course the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979 that elevated gender discrimination to a cross-cutting theme in international politics and also referred to children in the context of gender discrimination. It contains several articles that have a bearing on children, both in terms of the relationship between mothers and their children as well as with regard to the special situation of the girl child.

In Article 5(b), CEDAW envisages that "family education includes a proper understanding of maternity as a social function and the recognition of the common responsibility of men and women in the upbringing and development of their children," it being understood that the interest of the child is the primordial consideration in all cases (van Bueren 1993, 57). Relating to the girl child, Article 10 calls for equal opportunities in education and for equal respect for men and women.

These provisions testify to a growing recognition of the child's best interests in family matters and, by defning them as superior to the interests of other parties (parents, public authorities, custodians), a slow but steady elevation of the child's status in international law. The growing recognition of gender dynamics as being relevant to social governance and the identifcation of the 'girl child' as a particularly vulnerable group of children resulted in the creation of specifc programs and policies targeting the discrimination of girls in social policy, most notably in education, and, to a lesser extent, in health. In 1990, 44% of the programs funded by the World Bank proposed activities to improve female education, and the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the World Declaration on Education for All. These landmarks were the starting point for a gradual mainstreaming of gender issues into the activities of IOs, which also meant an increasing focus on girls as especially vulnerable and in need of social protection (Vaughan 2010). More recently, multi-stakeholder initiatives have emerged in this area, such as the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI) established in 2008. The changing status of the child in international politics has also been refected in the activities of a number of international organizations beyond those of an explicit child-related mandate such as UNICEF (Fig. 6.1).

## The Evolution of Children's Rights in International Law

With the adoption of the UNCRC, all those different provisions scattered among previously existing international legal documents were drawn together in what was then the most comprehensive international human rights treaty ever written and adopted. The CRC, however, was not the frst international legal document devoted solely to children, their wellbeing and their rights. The League of Nations had formulated a very short set of moral aspirations for children in its 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child ("The child that is hungry must be fed…"),4 and the UN set out to formulate a brief catalog of children's rights for the frst time in its 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child up until the 1970s; however, the international politics on childhood was, essentially, a politics of protecting children under exceptional circumstances—those exploited, hungry, in situations of armed confict or violence, disabled or neglected. Thus, for a long time, children's rights were placed in the context of social policy toward those most in need, framed in terms of charity, benevolence and caring for those most vulnerable and exposed.

In the context of this rather narrow child rights perspective and agenda, the CRC stood out as a groundbreaking document, formulating a set of universal rights to be claimed by each and every child (i.e. the individual child). It was also the frst international treaty that identifed concrete duty-bearers, namely the States Parties, but also extended duties to parents, families, legal guardians and society at large to ensure, fulfll and respect children's rights. There have been several attempts to categorize and systematize the 41 substantive articles in the CRC. Some authors have suggested to use the '3 Ps' (provision, protection, participation) in order to classify children's rights, while others have differentiated alongside the negative/positive divide or, classically, using the differentiation between

<sup>4</sup>Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924. https://www.humanium.org/ en/text-2/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights. Beyond these largely legal exercises, however, the CRC is also interesting in the way it seeks to capture a universal image of childhood to which all of the drafters of the CRC could agree. Although the CRC contained a number of groundbreaking elements that extended children's rights toward adolescents and thereby dramatically increased the number of rights-holders, it was also still frmly grounded in long-standing protective and paternalistic images of childhood. At the same time, it also sought to give expression to culturally varying notions of childhood and child protection. As I will discuss below, the contemporary discussion on the CRC is nevertheless not only preoccupied with questions of compliance, governance and implementation—it also interprets the CRC as essentially a refection of Western or Northern ideas and ideals of childhood, as an instrument of power and as an example of governmentality.

With regard to monitoring and assessing the national implementation of children's rights principles, the Committee on the Rights of the Child occupies a paramount role. Under the CRC, States Parties are obliged to submit reports on their progress in implementing the provisions of the CRC on a regular basis. Article 44 of the CRC stipulates that States Parties must submit their frst report after a maximum of two years after ratifcation, thereafter every fve years. These reports are then reviewed and commented on by the CRC Committee which consists of 18 independent experts (originally only 10 experts) and meets annually in Geneva. The Committee is not only guiding States Parties in their implementation through its Concluding Observations—it also revisits the rights of the child in light of new issues and legal interpretations through its General Comments. The Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on a Communications Procedure (OP3-CRC)—which was adopted in 2011 and entered into force in 2014—constitutes yet another groundbreaking step in the fortifcation of the status of the child as an individual and active rights-holder under international law. The Optional Protocol establishing a Complaints Mechanism for children under international law foresees the possibility for individuals or groups of individuals to submit communications directly to the CRC Committee if they are within the jurisdiction of a State Party, claiming to be the victims of a violation of either the CRC or its Optional Protocols committed by the State Party.

Narrowing down a discussion of children's rights to global social governance, it appears that the contemporary child rights regime covers the majority of the substantive social governance issues assembled in this edited volume: employment and child labor; care; migration; education; gender; disability; health; water (as in access to clean and safe drinking water); and food security. For all of these dimensions of global social governance, legal provisions exist specifcally for children.

The Contemporary IO Landscape and 'Organizational Ecology' of Children's Rights

#### *Types, Roles and Constellations of IOs in Global Social Governance*

Revisiting global social governance as it relates to children's rights brings to light an extremely densely populated, pluralist and complicated landscape of intergovernmental, non-governmental and hybrid, public-private organizations and networks. It is nevertheless possible to identify several central—and a large number of peripheral—international organizations and rule-systems protecting children and promoting their rights in global social policy. These organizations can be classifed using classical typologies such as standard-setting organizations versus operational organizations versus fnancing organizations, or general IOs versus specialized organizations and programs. With regard to monitoring State Parties' compliance with their obligations under the CRC, the Committee on the Rights of the Child stands out as the most central actor, supported, of course, by a broad array of non-state actors and other crucial mechanisms such as the Universal Periodic Review. Due to its history as the frst special fund set up for children, UNICEF stands out as the most well-known international organization working on issues of child protection and children's rights. Despite its outstanding role, however, UNICEF only began to embrace the philosophy and terminology of children's rights in the late 1990s. In fact, the organization had been a mostly invisible actor in the drafting of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and, due to its focus on countries in the Global South, had been very reluctant to embrace a child rights agenda that would lead away from its traditionally needsbased, child protection approach.

Three standard-setting international organizations stand out as particularly pertinent to global social policy for children: the International Labour Organizations (ILO) as the core rule-making authority in the area of child labor and, to a lesser extent, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Even though the World Bank does not have a separate programming area for children, its project portfolio reveals that child health and primary education, in particular, are recurring focal points of World Bank-funded projects. Other international organizations immediately relevant to global social policy for children are UNDP and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). A broader trend starting in the 1990s (but particularly after 2000) toward the creation and institutionalization of more hybrid, public-private (or multi-stakeholder) initiatives has also involved the establishment of a broad array of issue-specifc or problem-specifc partnerships for health, education, water, sanitation or food security targeting children specifcally. Outstanding examples of such partnerships or initiatives are the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, or the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Even more recently, a number of inter-agency initiatives involving two or more international organizations (such as the European Union (EU) and UNICEF, for example) have been set up in order to jointly address issues such as child malnutrition.5 At present, the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 are the main drivers behind increasing inter-agency collaboration and coordination in development cooperation, as well as cooperation focused on children as a specifc group.

As an expression of the growing visibility and salience of child-related matters and the increasing acceptance of child protection norms in all areas of international politics, it appears that organizations and bodies that had hitherto not dealt with children's issues and rights have also become involved in this area. Former child soldiers have been speaking in front of the Security Council on matters related to children and armed confict. The International Criminal Court has been investigating the use of child soldiers in armed confict as a crime against humanity and a basis for prosecuting war crimes. The UN Global Compact has included the "effective abolition of child labour" (Principle 5) in its 10 Principles for socially responsible global business. Together with the ILO, the Global Compact

<sup>5</sup>Generally see: UNICEF, "What we do." https://www.unicef.org/eu/what-we-do. Accessed February 25, 2020; UNICEF Ethiopia, "EU Partnership Paves the Way for Better Nutrition for Children and Women in Ethiopia." https://unicefethiopia.org/2017/03/01/ eu-partnership-paves-the-way-for-better-nutrition-for-children-and-women-in-ethiopia/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

has set up a Child Labour Platform for fostering dialogue on best practices and sharing experiences, particularly in abolishing child labor in the supply chain.6 As an extension to these activities, UNICEF, the Global Compact and Save the Children (the most powerful transnational NGO in the feld of child protection and children's rights) have developed the 'Children's Rights and Business Principles' in order to highlight the specifc situation, needs and rights that children have and thereby give more concrete shape to the UN Business and Human Rights principles.

It is also on the level of regional organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Commission and the Council of Europe that an increasing recognition of child rights in the context of discourses and policies on social inclusion/ exclusion is observable. The necessity of becoming more receptive to human rights standards in the creation and implementation of social policies is clearly visible, at least at the level of programmatic language of the EU and the OECD, especially where children are concerned. In her recent paper, Kišūnaitė assesses the extent to which "European governance and policies create a favourable framework for protecting children's rights" (Kišūnaitė 2019, 173). Her paper portrays the European Union as a latecomer with regard to incorporating child rights principles in its policymaking, claiming that "children's rights protection arrived at the forefront of EU policies just ten years ago" (173). So far, in the context of the European Union, child rights have been explicitly included in Art. 3.3 of the Treaty of Lisbon and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 24). In 2011, the EU adopted its Agenda for the Rights of the Child as an instrument toward the mainstreaming of child rights in all EU policy spheres. In this EU Agenda, a few selected areas of action are identifed, including the protection of children "when they are vulnerable"—the area that most clearly relates to social policy issues such as poverty and social exclusion, health, disability and education (European Commission 2011).

A recurrent theme in discourses on children's rights and discrimination against children in national and international policies has been the availability, dissemination and particularly disaggregation of data for children. As a consequence, global social governance in the name of children's rights has come to embrace an increasing amount of initiatives working toward the improvement of the 'data situation' concerning children. In

<sup>6</sup>Global Compact & ILO, "Share Best Practices on the Child Labour Platform." https:// www.unglobalcompact.org/take-action/action/child-labour. Accessed February 25, 2020.

particular, methodologies for monitoring children's economic and social rights have been described as "exploding" in recent years, such as the development of specifc indicators or benchmarks, child rights-based budget analysis or child rights impact assessments (Nolan 2013). Clearly, such initiatives envisage a stronger knowledge base for evidence-based policymaking on behalf of children and, more generally, a stronger visibility of children in the budgets of national authorities and international organizations.7 UN Data, the central data repository of the United Nations,8 contains a wealth of statistics on the specifc situation of children, concerning for example school enrolment, health status or gender inequality. In this regard, the Millennium Development Goals (as well as their successor, the SDGs) with their clear preference for measurable development indicators have contributed signifcantly to the growth in statistical data on the specifc situation of children in social policy areas such as health, education, nutrition and labor. The above-mentioned EU Agenda for the Rights of the Child also calls for better "evidence-based" policymaking in the area of child protection and child rights, asking its member states to establish "child-rights related policy targets" and address "gaps in knowledge about the situation and needs of the most vulnerable groups of children" (European Commission 2011, 5).

As the above makes abundantly clear, the governance of childhood and children's rights through global social policies has evolved from a rather narrow feld of international cooperation largely in the hands of UN special agencies and programs such as UNICEF or WHO (administering a rather narrow basic needs agenda) to a central dimension of international policymaking and global governance in all areas of international cooperation. Children's rights can thus be considered a cross-cutting theme or norm-catalog that has found its way into the work and policies of all international organizations in one way or another. When it comes to addressing children's rights in global social policy, most IOs with a specifc focus, expertise, and programming area on children deal with social policy issues in low- and middle-income countries. There is, therefore, a strong overlap between global social policy and development cooperation. It is in the context of social policies addressing the Global South, however, that the notion of children's rights confronts particular political and cultural

<sup>7</sup>Examples: UNICEF, "UNICEF Data: Monitoring the situation of children and women." https://data.unicef.org/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

<sup>8</sup>UNdata Explorer. http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx. Accessed February 25, 2020.

challenges. Here, repeatedly, the contemporary children's rights regime has been assessed as "too weak" to signifcantly change "the material realities of vulnerable children's lives" (Grugel 2013, 19). Children's social policies have been described as being fraught with complexities and "persistent deprivations" (Khadka 2013, 616). Applying a political economy perspective on social rights in the developing world, Khadhka questions the prioritization of rights in the "mainstream child rights discourse" and its usefulness in resource-poor contexts (Khadka 2013, 616) Table 6.1.


**Table 6.1** IOs, children's rights and selected recent activities


**Table 6.1** (continued)

a UNICEF, "Nutrition." https://www.unicef.org/eu/nutrition. Accessed February 25, 2020

bILO, "International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour and Forced Labour (IPEC+)." https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/how-the-ilo-works/fagships/ipec-plus/lang%2D%2Den/ index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020; ILO, "International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour and Forced Labour (IPEC+)." https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/how-the-ilo-works/ fagships/WCMS\_495567/lang%2D%2Dru/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020

c ILO, "Accelerating action for the elimination of child labour in supply chains in Africa (ACCEL Africa)." https://www.ilo.org/ipec/projects/global/WCMS\_698536/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020

dILO, "Eliminating child labour and forced labour in the cotton, textile and garment value chains: an integrated approach." https://www.ilo.org/ipec/projects/global/WCMS\_649126/lang%2D%2Den/ index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020

e WHO, "Ending preventable child deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea by 2025." https://www.who. int/maternal\_child\_adolescent/documents/global\_action\_plan\_pneumonia\_diarrhoea/en/. Accessed February 25, 2020

f WHO, "Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescent's Health 2016–2030." https://www. who.int/life-course/partners/global-strategy/en/. Accessed February 25, 2020

g UNESCO, "From access to empowerment: UNESCO strategy for gender equality in and through education 2019–2025." https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000369000. Accessed February 25, 2020

hUNESCO, "G7 France/UNESCO International Conference—Innovating for girls' and women's empowerment through education." https://en.unesco.org/events/g7-franceunesco-internationalconference-innovating-girls-and-womens-empowerment-through. Accessed February 25, 2020

i World Bank, "Early Childhood Development." https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/earlychildhooddevelopment#3. Accessed February 25, 2020

j World Bank, "GAMBIA—READ: Results for Education Achievement and Development Project." https://projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/project-detail/P133079?lang=en. Accessed February 25, 2020

# Global Social Policy on Children's Rights Between Implementation and Contestation

As contemporary refections on the meaning and implications of children's rights (particularly those promoted by the CRC) in 2020 have exposed, the adoption of a legally binding human rights treaty for children has had a catalytic effect on legal, political and societal change in most countries of the world. It has also led to a reconfguration of global social governance, both in terms of the broader norms shaping global social governance and in terms of the transformations of international institutions and actor landscapes and constellations. Based on the CRC, more and more organizations active in development cooperation have been formulating, adopting and implementing child rights-based approaches to development; the number of independent national human rights institutions for children has signifcantly increased (UNICEF 2013) all over the world, and many countries have adopted National Plans of Action or changed national constitutions and law in order to refect the obligations of their governments under the CRC. Long-standing think tanks and NGOs have created new departments or programming sections exclusively for children and youth, specialized research institutes dedicated to child-related issues have been established, and of course countless new civil society actors have entered the landscape of global social governance on children's rights. UNICEF, the largest intergovernmental organization (IGO) addressing the special situation of children, has reformulated its programming priorities by implementing a rights-based approach (RBA) with the Convention at its core. In this respect, the CRC can be seen as the principal driving force behind a global culture of children's rights and an ever-increasing salience of children's rights in international and domestic politics.

At the same time that efforts to implement children's rights domestically and internationally have accelerated, however, scholars have also started to question this (pre)dominance of matters of implementation in research on children rights, particularly a rather rigid and simple understanding of how international human rights standards are realized in domestic contexts (Holzscheiter et al. 2019). The contemporary debate on children's rights among scholars and practitioners, which has largely been informed by Postcolonial and Critical Theory, also brings to light moments and processes of contestation and resistance to a powerful global discourse on appropriate childhood encapsulated in children's rights standards, questioning the easy traveling of seemingly universal values across time and space. Authors who have assessed the relevance of the CRC in the Global South have pointed to a tension between these global ideals, on the one hand, and social and cultural practices in the Global South, on the other, looking, for example, at corporal punishment, child participation or working children (Balagopalan 2019; Fay 2019; Imoh 2019). Accordingly, contemporary engagement with children's rights in the context of global governance reconceptualizes the relationship between these norms and global and domestic institutions, policies and practices as more ambivalent and contentious, assuming that the meaning of such norms cannot be inferred and understood independently of the context (local, cultural, linguistic, political, historical, institutional etc.) in which they are debated and enacted (Wiener 2018; Kaime 2010). Following this twist in the debate on children's rights, scholarly interest has shifted toward regional human rights treaties and institutions (such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the ASEAN Commission on the Rights of Women and Children, the European Court of Human Rights, or Independent National Human Rights Institutions) as vital ingredients of a stronger cultural embedding of core principles and ideas codifed in the CRC.

#### *Taming the Beast of Children's Rights—The Separation of Children and Youth Advocacy in Global Social Policy*

An analysis of the organizational landscape in which global social governance related to children's rights is taking place not only brings to light the strong diffusion of children's rights across most, if not all, international organizations (i.e. child rights mainstreaming)—it also exhibits confict lines around the separation of children from other social groups enjoying special protective status in international politics, above all women and youth. More than ever, contemporary global social governance seeks to address adolescents and youth as a previously 'forgotten' group. At the same time, it can be argued that the separation of children's issues and youth issues which is visible when looking at the programming areas of international organizations is an artifcial construct, particularly in light of the broad defnition of 'childhood' under the CRC which includes children between 0 and 18 years of age. This arguably artifcial separation can also be characterized as a more protective child rights agenda and a more emancipatory, agency-oriented youth agenda. It is refected in the fact that most organizations maintain different programming sections on child-related issues (often associated with child protection) and on youth matters (often framed as matters of youth 'agency' or 'empowerment').9 The Joint United Nations Programme on human immunodefciency virus/Acquired Immune Defciency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) (UNAIDS) has separate program areas for 'children' and 'young people'. While the former targets unborn or very young children (i.e. pediatric HIV, seeking to eliminate new HIV infections in children), the 'Youth Programme' established in 2012 describes young people as benefciaries, partners and leaders, seeking to "strengthen young people's leadership skills."10 Child (rights) focused global social governance thus testifes to dynamics of institutional fragmentation in which contentious issues in child-related social policies are relegated to the 'youth' realm in order to ensure governability (e.g. sexual and reproductive rights, youth unemployment, youth participation).

# IOs and Discourses on Childhood in Global Social Governance

For many, the contemporary notion of children's rights encapsulates a rather specifc ideal of childhood as a phase in life that is "free of responsibilities, which would include work, and dominated by education and leisure within the family context" (Baker and Hinton 2001, 190). In fact, children's rights as formulated in the CRC and interpreted by the CRC Committee continue to be challenged on the grounds of their modern, Western bias (Imoh and Ame 2012). Boyden, even if very tentatively, has insinuated that the CRC might be even more 'Western' in its character than other human rights treaties (Boyden 1997, 197). This Western bias expresses itself, after all, in an image of children as non-economic and non-political human beings. Although social policy issues still continue to be closer to a traditional discourse and focus on child rights as passive rights to protection, cross-cultural dialogue in the area of social policy and protection also appears to be more promising, as evidenced, for example,

<sup>9</sup> See for example UNDP's activities on "empowering youth" under the rubric of "Democratic governance and peacebuilding." https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/ home/democratic-governance-and-peacebuilding/empowering-youth.html. Accessed February 25, 2020.

10UNAIDS, "Young people." https://www.unaids.org/en/topic/young-people. Accessed February 25, 2020.

by the establishment of regional human rights institutions on child rights such as the ASEAN Commission on the Rights of Women and Children in 2010 or the creation of a Rapporteur on Children's Rights in the Context of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1998.

Notions of childhood primarily experienced in the global North, therefore, constitute a powerful leitmotif in global social governance as much as they are the target of contestation by different 'norm-antipreneurs' (Bloomfeld and Scott 2018), many of whom are from the Global South. In fact, it is against the 'benchmark' of a globalized ideal of childhood and its core settings—home, school, family—that certain 'blind spots' in global social governance have become apparen, such as children living in the streets, or child-headed households. At the same time, it is above all in global social governance that dissident voices have made themselves heard and where demands for the recognition of children's economic agency, in particular, have also brought with them forceful claims for seeing children as social and political agents. With its long historical legacy, the international debate on appropriate rules and policies to regulate child work and abolish child labor is a showcase for contending philosophies on childhood and children's rights and the ongoing resistance to the social, economic and political agency of under-18s. On a more general level, these debates testify to the disputed nature of children's (transnational) citizenship, both in terms of the abstract sense (i.e. children as citizens with social and political rights) and in terms of concrete debates over nationality, citizenship and (un)equal access to social services (education, health, housing, social benefts).

#### Conclusion

As this chapter has demonstrated, international organizations are indispensable promoters of children's rights in global social governance. They pursue a wide range of activities geared toward the diffusion, implementation and concretization of international children's rights standards in global, regional and domestic social policy. Seeking to foster a growing and sustained sensitivity and commitment to children's rights in diverse social policy felds (education, health, food, housing), the fnancial contributions of international organizations have been particularly critical in low- and middle-income countries. While highlighting the manifold positive contributions of international organizations in making children's rights a systematic consideration in global social policy, this chapter has also sought to point to the contested meaning of 'children's rights' when it comes to accepting an image of children as direct and active rightsholders, including their right to participate in decisions affecting them. Incorporating children's rights in global social policy thus requires international organizations to consider these rights as consequential not only to the policies and programs they promote *vis-à-vis* individual countries, but also to their own polity and procedural rules, including the necessity to increase the participatory space and possibilities for articulation for rights-holders aged 18 and below.

#### References


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# Global Discourses, Regional Framings and Individual Showcasing: Analyzing the World of Education IOs

*Dennis Niemann and Kerstin Martens*

# Introduction

Education is commonly heralded as one of the key policies for fostering future progress and well-being. Accordingly, governments, national stakeholders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and International Organizations (IOs) advocate improvements in education almost as a *sine* 

This chapter is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342. We thank Gabrielle Bieser, Aaron Derner, David Krogmann, and Daniel Titze for their assistance in coding the IO documents.

D. Niemann (\*) • K. Martens

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail: dniemann@uni-bremen.de; martensk@uni-bremen.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 163

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_7

*qua non* for sustainable human development. Hence, education policy is also conceptualized as a social policy in the sense that it enables individuals to acquire skills for living an independent and fulflled life while also providing states with a toolkit to stimulate economic growth and social cohesion. However, different actors hold different views on the goals of education: while some emphasize the positive economic effects that education has on states and individuals, others refer to the feedback loop of education on the social integration of societies. In short, there is no universally or uniformly accepted idea about the purposes of education.

At the same time, education has gradually and constantly become an increasingly internationalized issue area. By being under constant pressure through ongoing globalization processes, social policies in general and education policy, in particular, can no longer be viewed without reference to the global context (Deacon 2007, 7; Mundy 2007). This expanding internationalization is best refected by the multitude of activities and initiatives of IOs in the policy feld of education. Since the second half of the 1990s in particular, education has been seen as a domain that was boosted into the global arena of policy making in the context of international initiatives, such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the European Bologna Process. In response, national education systems were, for the most part, urged to respond to new challenges from the knowledge economy.

Central to the impact of IOs in international politics in general and in education, in particular, is their ability to exercise autonomy *and* authority at the same time (Niemann 2012). As they are often equipped by their founders to set agendas, foster implementation, and make binding decisions in the face of state sovereignty, IOs are more than the sum of their member states' interests (Koremenos et al. 2001). Thus, they can be considered powerful actors who possess "a sphere of autonomy and a resource they can use to shape the behavior of others in both direct and indirect ways" (Barnett and Finnemore 2005, 162). IOs are thus able to shape discourses, to make decisions which may counter the wishes and virtues of their members, as well as infuence policy implementation.

For education, it is now indisputable that IOs infuence international and domestic education policy making processes. In particular, it has been shown that major IOs active in education, such as the OECD, the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), or the World Bank, set and infuence agendas for education purposes and goals in signifcant ways. As we argued elsewhere, the OECD is today able to disseminate its program through large-scale education assessments globally—reaching well beyond the group of its member states (Niemann and Martens 2018). The globally operating UNESCO signifcantly changed the discursive frame regarding the context of education: from education for peace to education in confict (Lerch and Buckner 2018). However, beyond single case studies on prominent IOs in education, we know comparatively little about how the population of education IOs is constituted and how they refect on and promote education purposes.

In this contribution we have two analytical objectives. First, we map the population of education IOs to describe the organizational feld in which the social policy discourse in the sub-area of education takes place. The assessment of what types of IOs deal with education is summarized in a typology to identify different clusters of IOs and provide accounts of both their characteristics and the different niches they have populated in the organizational feld of education policy. Second, given that IOs can be viewed as infuential, autonomous actors, it is important to show which ideas they develop and promote regarding education. How to think about an issue heavily infuences which actions are taken and which recommendations are given. Hence, the repercussions that IO activities can have on states and their education systems are ultimately shaped by the ideational framing of IOs. We thus analyze the ideas IOs hold regarding education and show how the discourse on education has developed over time within the population of IOs.

Overall, both of our research aims are related. By generating a typology of education IOs and identifying different clusters, we also link the clusters to overarching education ideas. In this chapter, we provide an empirical assessment of the population of education IOs and analyze the ideas these IOs hold regarding education (purpose) as suggested by the introduction of this volume. Accounts that might explain the observed phenomena are discussed in the concluding paragraphs.

#### What We Know About Education IOs

The research on IOs in the feld of education mainly focuses on case studies of large and globally visible IOs. Overall, few contributions examine IOs in education in an encompassing or overarching way (exceptions being, McNeely 1995; Mundy 2007) and few deal with more than one case or undertake a comparative analysis (exceptions being, e.g., Moutsios 2009; Resnik 2006). Most prominent, however, are case studies about the 'usual suspects' of IOs in education, namely UNESCO, the World Bank, and the OECD. Academic literature on the World Bank's engagement in education, for example, focuses primarily on fnancial issues, its lending policy, and how these have shaped the economic and education policies of governments (Banya and Elu 2001; Jones 1997). Other literature critically refects on the World Bank's economic ideology and suggests alternatives to its view (Heyneman 2003; Klees 2002) or analyzes individual aspects of the World Bank's work in education, such as different regions, educational levels, or its work in the context of development (Mazrui 1997; Verger et al. 2014).

Since UNESCO has long been an IO in education, academic work on its activities dates back decades. Given its structural incorporation into the worldwide UN system, academic work on UNESCO and its activities in education primarily look at its engagement in developing countries of the Global South along with its basic education goals, such as literacy (e.g., Jones 1988). Current literature focuses on its implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education (e.g., Walid and Luetz 2017). By contrast, the OECD is the newest 'kid on the education bloc.' Although its main focus is laid on economic cooperation among Western economically developed states, it became an "eminence grise" (Rinne et al. 2004) by the turn of the millennium in the feld of education after establishing its Programme for International Student Assessment, better known under its abbreviation PISA. Since then, academic literature on the OECD, on education, and on PISA in particular has increased substantially: for example, literature examines how PISA came about (Henry et al. 2001; Martens 2007), how the OECD exercises governance in education and what impact PISA has (Bieber and Martens 2011; Grek 2009), and how the OECD promotes its education model and itself worldwide as "infrastructural modes of global governance" (Sellar and Lingard 2014) or as a "knowledge broker" (Niemann and Martens 2018) in education.

Taken together, there is a lot of literature on the internationalization of education policy in general and about the role or impact that individual IOs play or have in this process. However, there is surprisingly little knowledge about how the population of education IOs as a whole is constituted, what characteristics can be observed, and how this has been changing over time. We aim to fll this research gap.

#### Population of IOs in Education

In order to understand what infuences the ideas of education IOs and determines organizational change, it is essential to identify who is actually populating the organizational feld of international education policy. Next to IOs in education policy, there are obviously also many NGOs, think tanks, private foundations, and donors who are infuential players in the feld; however, in this contribution, we concentrate only on IOs which are conceptualized and synonymously used with the term Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) (Rittberger et al. 2012). Thus, although perhaps some NGOs, like the Gates Foundation, are considerably important and active players in the global education sphere, they were not considered in our analysis.1 Of the couple of hundreds of existing IOs, only a few deal with education policy and even fewer leave a recognizable footprint that makes them infuential players in education policy. Identifying who is out there in the internationalized area of education policy is a promising frst step in providing some explanations as to why and how the discourse has developed.

#### *Defning 'Education' IOs*

In our case, it is the issue area of education that is the distinctive feature of those IOs we are interested in. In this regard, an IO is defned as an 'education' IO if it has three complementary features regarding its policy program, organizational structure, operational activities, and aspired scope. First, education has to be mentioned in the IO's programmatic mission statement as a designated task of the IO (be it in the IO's preamble, founding treaty, amended treaties, or on its current websites). Second, it has to have its own permanent organizational (sub-)department, unit, or otherwise named structural component which specifcally deals with issues of education (or training). Third, the IO has to address education *policy* issues. Hence, we exclude IOs from our defnition of education IOs that

1Accordingly, the Global Partnership for Education is not part of our data set as states only function as donor countries. Similarly, intergovernmental organizations in a legal sense need to be distinguished from simple groupings or coalitions of states, such as the Education Reform Initiative of South Eastern Europe (ERISEE), Conférence des ministres de l'éducation des pays ayant le français en partage (CONFEMEN), or the Coordinación Educativa y Cultural Centroamericana (CECO), which we also do not consider in this chapter.

deal with strictly educational topics, like teaching methods or coordinating scientifc cooperation, and do not address education policy. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also has an educational focus, but its activities mainly address the training of own staff with regard to security-related issues. It does not have any overarching education idea on potential education reforms or on how to organize education policy which it seeks to disseminate to its members. It also excludes IOs such as the Islamic Development Bank which only gives out scholarships.

While IOs are institutions that "can cover several issue areas of international relations" (Rittberger et al. 2012, 6), this means that education IOs do not necessarily have to focus solely on education issues. Education can be one of many policy felds the IO is committed to. Another analytical constraint for us is that we only include IOs that were still active in 2019. Since we are interested in analyzing the contemporary discourse on education, dissolved or suspended education IOs are not in our sample.

#### *The Population of Education IOs*

Taking the defnition of IOs into account, we identifed the population of education IOs by searching the Yearbook of International Organizations (YIO) as well as the Correlates of War (COW) data sets. Every single IO mentioned in these two data sets which met the key criteria of an IO defnition, in general, was individually examined regarding its constituting documents (e.g. preamble, founding, or amended treaties) and its web pages and as to whether they refer to education as a feld of activity. In our search, we included all initiatives of IOs in the education sector which relate to school education (primary and secondary level) and/or the tertiary education sector. Each IO was examined by hand as regards any activities related to education. After reviewing the individual organizations, a total of N=30 organizations were identifed from the two data sets (see Table 7.1).

The identifed education IOs feature several different characteristics that allow for a more nuanced geographic clustering. In our set, fve IOs are related to the United Nations family and thus promote education issues *worldwide*. Next to UNESCO, the ILO, and the World Bank, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are also involved in education issues. A special case of a worldwide active


#### **Table 7.1** Education IOs

a Member states as of 2017. Several states recently suspended or withdrew their membership in UNASUR due to the crisis in Venezuela, https://www.dw.com/de/lateinamerikanisches-b%C3%BCndnis-unasurvor-dem-ende/a-45070291. Accessed March 20, 2020

education IO outside the UN system is the OECD. Although the OECD technically has a restricted membership which only includes the most advanced economies, its scope reaches well beyond its member states in terms of its education activities (and program). The IO provides services and recommendations for any state that is interested in joining the OECD's education portfolio (e.g. participation in PISA, PISA for Development, etc., see Addey 2017). We thus classifed the OECD as a global education IO.

Most education IOs, however, can be found on a *regional level*. In total, 20 regional education IOs exist (see Fig. 7.1). In Europe this category includes the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the European Union (EU), and the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS), which is even limited to a specifc region within Europe. In Asia, most education IOs also narrowly focus on sub-continental regions, particularly on South and Southeast Asia. Next to the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), the Asia-Pacifc Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are also active education IOs. An exception within Asia is the Intergovernmental Foundation for Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Cooperation (IFESCCO), a sub-organization of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) of former states of the Soviet Union. In the Americas, there are even six IOs active in the feld of education and these include the Organization of American States (OAS), Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), as well as the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). On the African continent, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the African Union (AU), and the African Development Bank (AfDB) make reference to education issues, with ECCAS being a partially autonomous regional organization within the AU framework. In the Arab world, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientifc Organization (ALECSO) and the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States (ABEGS) are education organizations.

In addition, four IOs cannot be clearly assigned to one particular region. However, since membership to them is bound by other factors that do not cover all states, they are categorized as *transregional* IOs. For instance, Europe and Asia 'share' the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF), and the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) has members from Latin and Middle America, as well as from the European countries of Portugal and Spain. The Commonwealth Secretariat, which describes itself as "a voluntary association of 52 independent and equal sovereign states, […] [t]hirty of our members are small states, many of which are island nations,"2 also spans across several regions (but not the globe). Finally, access to the Islamic Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) is bound to the religious alignment of the state toward Islam. Thus, we can see substantial differences between the IOs regarding the requirements for membership: while few education IOs are open to all sovereign states, the majority have a restricted membership which is bound to certain conditions, be they regional, cultural, or economic preconditions.

In systemizing our fndings regarding the population of education IOs beyond geographic patterns, we fnd a divided organization feld (see Fig. 7.1). On the one hand, we have seven specialized education IOs, also characterized by an E in their name which stands for Education. One of their major founding missions, and in some cases their sole founding mission, is thus to deal with education topics. We refer to these as *distinct* education IOs. Unlike UNESCO, the six smaller *distinct* IOs all cover their specifc education 'niche': ISESCO, a sub-unit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, represents Islamic education goals on religious grounds, SEAMEO represents the values of the Southeast Asian region, ALECSO and ABEGS are bound to the Arab region, IFESCCO to the former Soviet region, while the OEI can be characterized as consisting of an Ibero-Portuguese cultural heritage. Interestingly, three *distinct* education IOs cover the Arab/Islamic area. In terms of niche theory, this indicates that the overall competition in this area is not yet settled and refects a strong emphasis on education in this cultural sphere.

On the other hand, this minority of *distinct* education IOs within the organizational feld is facing a majority of IOs that cover several policy felds, with education being only one of them. Thus, a key characteristic of the other group of education IOs is that they only discovered education as an area of expertise at some point in time after their foundation. They usually do not have any outstanding education focus embedded in their founding treaties, but their scope of issues is either broad and general, or specialized in other single policy felds. We refer to these IOs as *derivative* education IOs. The largest group of *derivative* education IOs are nine IOs

<sup>2</sup> http://thecommonwealth.org/about-us. Accessed March, 19, 2020.

**Fig. 7.1** Mapping the population of education IOs. (Source: own account, colors indicate primary focus area of IOs)

whose original missions primarily pertained to economic cooperation, most noticeable the different 'banks' which focus on economic growth and development but also started to work on education. This fnding also underscores that education becomes increasingly important and that diverse IOs feel the need to cover education topics in order to address their original aims. For instance, the World Bank views education as an intermediary means to fght poverty. For the OECD, education is decisive in generating human capital. Hence, in order to fulfill their original mandate, these IOs identifed education as one crucial lever.

From this map in Fig. 7.1 we can see that the more specialized an education IO is with regard to membership rules (restricted) and issue area (distinct), the less competition it faces within its niche. For instance, the AU almost has a monopoly when it comes to education on the African continent. In contrast, six IOs address education issues in the Americas and six cover Asia. Furthermore, two specialized education IOs are active in the Arab region. In addition, the global players, that is the three UN organizations, the World Bank, the ILO, and also the OECD, compete with each other in the feld of education. This competition is not restricted to international forums but also takes place on the regional and national level, since all global IOs conduct and fund on-site education projects. On the one hand, some IOs like the ISESCO or SEAMEO have populated the niches for Islamic education and Southeast Asian education, but this does not mean that they do not face any competition or that they have a monopoly on education within their regional or cultural niche. Since others, like the OECD or UNESCO, operate globally, the activities of regional education IOs are interfering with programs of the global IOs. For example, the OECD's quasi-monopoly on defning large-scale education measurements also infuences how other IOs view education outcomes (Martens et al. 2016).

When taking the temporal development of education IOs into account, at least three instances have to be highlighted (see Fig. 7.2). First, a steady expansion took place: the number of education IOs rose from just 2 in 1945 to 30 in 2018. There was no sharp increase in any particular decade but rather constant expansion between 1945 and the mid-1990s. Second, the feld of education IOs was established almost as far back as the mid-1990s. Although education did not become a highly internationalized policy feld until the late 1990s, only two additional education IOs were established after 2005 (namely, the *derivative* UNASUR and the *distinctive* IFESCCO). Hence, education IOs could be assumed to be the causes, rather than the effects of increasing internationalization in the education area. Furthermore, all IOs in our population that existed by 1996 also covered education. This means that while in previous periods there were some IOs, like the ADB, which did not incorporate education into their thematic portfolio after their establishment; all IOs that were identifed as education IOs from the mid-1990s onward covered education topics from the beginning of their existence. Third, the *derivative* education IOs that originally had a focus on economic issues were

**Fig. 7.2** The rise of education IOs over time

comparatively latecomers (red bars in Fig. 7.2). While other derivative IOs began including education during the decade of 1956–1965, just one of fve existing economic IOs also dealt with education. In 1966–1975, the share rose to 50%, and by 1996 all nine economic IOs also included education in their thematic portfolio.

### Education Leitmotifs and Discourses

The typology of education IOs has shown that the population in this policy domain is multi-layered, diverse, and partially competitive. Against the background of how the feld of education IOs is organized, we address the ideas and leitmotifs that are featured in the discourse because an analysis of the education ideas put forward by IOs helps to assess how the discourse on education has developed over time and if a certain framing became dominant or vanished. As a criterion, we added the necessity that the IO has to publish visibly on education and has to aim for actively participating in the global education discourse. Hence, to be analyzed regarding its discourse as an education IO, it must go beyond self-proclaiming to cover education topics: the IO has to be active in the feld. If an IO met our defned requirements for being classifed as an education IO but lacked available documents on education or in English (since we focus on the global discourse), we excluded that IO from further discourse analysis. Thus, 24 IOs remained to be analyzed regarding their discourses.3

#### *What Are Education Ideas?*

Ideas on education usually establish some kind of means-end relationship: ideas frame how the purpose of education is perceived. In this regard, education reforms that IOs recommend to their member states are strongly shaped by the underlying ideas and "[i]deas have a lasting infuence on politics through their incorporation into the terms of political debates" (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, 20). Moreover, ideational leitmotifs are not static and can change over time. Thus, we expect that education IOs vary regarding the leitmotifs they hold. Since IOs compete for infuence within their thematic niche and exert soft governance through ideational framing (see Niemann et al., in this volume), we also expect IOs within the feld of education to disseminate their own views on the purpose of education. In doing so, they compete with each other for cognitive authority and legitimacy.

In addition, the birth characteristics of IOs' thematic scope can infuence their lasting ideas on education. IOs may propagate their mission statements universally if they claim global signifcance; however, they may also pursue cultural or regionally specifc goals, such as concentrating educational policy activities on a particular cultural area, making them inapplicable to a broader international community. For UNESCO, for example, the universalistic principle of 'education as a human right' is in the foreground; the ILO promotes social justice as well as human and workers' rights as part of a United Nations special agency concerned with labor that operates worldwide, whereas Islamic Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization and Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization appear to propagate more culturally particularistic values. Being a globally active IO, the OECD's PISA study claims global validity for their examples of 'what works' and infuences the educational reform processes of small nations that did not even participate in the PISA study (Niemann and Martens 2018). As another example, ISESCO diffuses cultural ideas from religious-Islamic education as a primary goal while simultaneously

<sup>3</sup> Six IOs are excluded from further detailed discourse analysis due to limited publications (less than ten publications on education policy in the English language). Excluded IOs: AfDB, ASEF, CBSS, IADB, IFESCCO, and Mercosur.

following global benchmarking guidelines, such as standardized measurement and comparison (Martens and Niemann 2019).

With regard to ideal types of education leitmotifs, a distinction can be drawn between two overarching key topics in the literature on educational goals. On the one hand, education may be considered from a utilitarian perspective which emphasizes positive economic effects of education as the engine of economic growth. As such, it expressly serves the development of human capital through the transfer of applicable skills, which leads to increased productivity. "From an economic background education provides a helpful means of improving the competitiveness of a national economy. It serves as a tool to generate a nation's wealth by coordinating investments in human capital" (Nagel et al. 2010, 15). This conception of utilitarian educational goals is often accompanied by standardization efforts of curricula and the increasing measurement of socalled competencies. In contrast to a utilitarian perspective, education purpose may also be framed from a citizenship standpoint. From this perspective, education is essential to the emergence of social capital and identity formation, since education in modern societies establishes or maintains the political integration of a society (Nagel et al. 2010, 15). Among these benefts is the transmission of common behavioral and cultural norms, and of a common language and a common history. Education and educational policy are considered the tasks of society as a whole, with the goal of empowering every individual citizen to participate in the social framework and guarantee social cohesion (Shuayb 2012). Both views are not mutually exclusive according to a zero-sum logic but can complement each other. However, when under a common framework, one key topic can be prioritized over the other.

Furthermore, both views can be applied to an individual or to a collective perspective on education purpose. On the one hand, Nagel et al. (2010) argue that education can be viewed within the utilitarian concept as a mechanism for individual skill formation or as a tool for fostering the growth of productivity and the wealth of nations. On the other hand, the liberal citizenship framing contains the idea that education can be understood as a "means of self-fulfllment and personal refnement by taking part in a collective cultural enterprise" or as a social right or duty which helps to increase each individual's chances of political and social participation (Nagel et al. 2010, 15). For the conceptualization and operationalization of such leitmotifs in education policy, we distinguish four ideal-typical principled beliefs of education (see Table 7.2). We apply this classifcation of the guiding principles of education in order to make variations of the means and concepts of education in different international organizations visible.

For example, in IO recommendations for education reforms, the overarching education purposes of economic utilitarianism and liberal citizenship are translated in concrete policy programs and activities in education. Thus, the perspective of economic utilitarianism is often combined with the promotion of standardized learning assessments and a curricular focus on skills relevant to the labor market. EFTA positions that "Education is one of the core objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth."4 In contrast, a citizenship framing tends to lead to the advocacy of social inclusion, individual's rights, and selfrefnement. UNASUR, for example, wants to "[e]nsure and promote the right to education for everyone";5 for UNICEF, "Universal access to quality education is not a privilege – it is a basic human right."6 Hence, the general leitmotif of an IO heavily infuences what the IO recommends to do in education policy.

#### *What Ideas Are IOs Promoting?*

When comparing the population of education IOs and summarizing their education ideas, it can be shown that over time some profound developments took place in how education is viewed by the population of IOs in this feld. Figure 7.2 displays the percentage of references to a certain education idea made by IOs in their main publications on education between 1919 and 2018. These publications were mostly mission statements, general proceedings on concepts, and progress reports. The data was coded according to the categories of the theoretical framework as outlined in Table 7.2. For example, in the period from 1996 to 2018, 27% of the coded IOs (N=24) referred to education purpose as liberal and individual. It is important to note that IOs can have more than one purpose at the same time. Naturally, this overview only offers a frst glance at education ideas and IOs.

<sup>4</sup> http://www.efta.int/eea/policy-areas/fanking-horizontal-policies/education-trainingyouth. Accessed March 19, 2020.

<sup>5</sup> https://www.academia.edu/22909516/regionalism\_and\_higher\_education\_in\_south\_ america\_a\_comparative\_analysis\_for\_understanding\_internationalization. Accessed June 23, 2020.

<sup>6</sup> https://www.unicef.org/education/. Accessed March 19, 2020.


**Table 7.2** Guiding leitmotifs of education

Adapted from Nagel et al. (2010, 16), own account

The assessment shows some major trends in the ideational framing of education within the population of IOs and at least two general developments can be identifed. First, the normative Lib./Coll. framing of education was always prominently put forward by IOs. Although it has slightly declined, it is still omnipresent when IOs address the purpose of education. For the vast majority of IOs, conceptualizing education as something to support citizenship issues and to promote universal norms is a core tenet.

Second, the economic-oriented utilitarian view on education continuously gained considerable support. This idea emphasizes the return on investment that education can bring through the development of the national economy (collective) and the enhancement of (individual) skills. While the individual focus on skill formation almost reached its peak by the early 1990s (and remained constantly relevant afterward), the view that education collectively serves the advancement of national economies became progressively more important. Especially since the mid-1990s, IOs have claimed that the purpose of education is to accumulate wealth for national economies. In contrast, the Lib./Indiv. framing tended to remain on a lower level. In the face of the growing emphasis on human capital development, it seemed to become unimportant for IOs to also emphasize the benefts of education for personal refnement or selfdevelopment. In sum, the utilitarian-oriented leitmotifs gained relevance, but not at the expense of the Lib./Coll. framing. Today, the two interpretations coexist within the population of education IOs.

#### *Competing or Complementing Paradigms on the Global Level?*

The coexistence of ideas also implies that almost all education IOs became multi-purpose IOs. This means that they hold more than one idea regarding education at the same time (see Fig. 7.3). While at the early phase (before 1956) each IO had one principal leitmotif regarding the purpose of education, this rose to 2.5 leitmotifs on average in the period from 1996 to 2018. It is also shown in Fig. 7.2 that nowadays, with the exception of the Lib./Indiv. perspective, all four ideational meta-frames are almost equally present. Hence, IOs increasingly communicate a holistic education idea and have broadened their scope by including diverse perspectives within one complementary ideational superstructure (Fig. 7.4).

The general developments regarding IOs' holistic leitmotifs in education can be illustrated by analyzing how different education IOs which have a leading position in global education policy have framed education over time. Two groups of IOs can be distinguished: frst, economic education IOs that incorporated a liberal framing of education purposes, and second, liberal IOs that increasingly included economic reasoning. Linking these fndings to the theoretical concepts depicted in Table 7.2, expansions on both the horizontal and the vertical axis can be observed.

The utilitarian-driven view on education was always central to the World Bank's education discourse: education should serve the purpose of fostering the economic development of states and societies. When the

**Fig. 7.3** Education leitmotifs of IOs over time. (Source: own account)

Bank discovered education as a feld of activity in the early 1960s, more economic-leaning approaches became institutionalized in its education program and the development of human capital was prioritized (Heyneman 2003). While the economic-oriented leitmotif was strengthened under the Washington Consensus, the Bank's education ideas continued to remain in line with neoclassical economic thinking when a Post-Washington Consensus began to emerge in the 1990s (Mundy and Verger 2015). In the view of the Bank, education affects how well individuals, communities, and nations fare and countries need more highly educated and skilled populations because the level of acquired "skills in a workforce […] predicts economic growth rates of a states" (World Bank 2011, 3), and learning is essential for human capital development (World Bank 2018). However, the Bank currently also frames education as a human right (World Bank 1999; World Bank 2018) and recognizes the limits of the market model for education (Robertson 2012). In sum, the economic view is still central to the Bank but embedded in a more holistic framework which also includes the positive effects that education can have on social developments. However, liberal views are linked (and subordinated) to an economic reasoning, namely one that emphasizes a return on investment.

The same applies to the OECD, which believes that the advancement of education systems should contribute frst and foremost to human capital formation and secondarily to the progress of social citizenship. From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s and under the leading paradigm of Keynesianism, the emphasis of the OECD's education activities progressively shifted toward issues related to the labor market and economic growth (Rubenson 2008). During this phase, the social and equity components of education policy "receded to the background, giving way to economic concerns" (Papadopoulos 2006, 25). The neoliberal interpretation of education was further strengthened in the 1980s when the OECD moved to a neoclassical supply-side orientation (Mundy 2007; Sellar and Lingard 2014). Since the mid-1990s, the OECD worked on strategies that dealt with developing human capital to counteract the negative effects of globalization (Henry et al. 2001; OECD 1996). Today, the OECD views human capital as "a major driver of a country's trend productivity, not least through its impact on innovation" (OECD 2010a, 18) and national education systems "need to equip people with knowledge, skills and tools to stay competitive and engaged" (OECD 2010–2011, 3). However, the OECD does not neglect a wider social aspect of education, having noted that education serves the provision of social cohesion (OECD 2010b) and overall well-being, including health issues for example (OECD 2007). Remarkably, social cohesion refers to economic factors: in order to create more social cohesion, education should enable individuals to advance economically. Concerning this matter, social dimensions were also included in the OECD's leitmotif of education, however, under an economic-centered framework.

UNESCO, in contrast, claims that the primary purpose of education is to promote norms and values. The IO laid down in its constitution that education is a means "to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affrmed for the peoples of the world" (UNESCO 1945, Article 1). This view remains at the core of UNESCO's work in education and was reemphasized in the following decades. Much like the World Bank and the OECD, however, UNESCO's framing of education also underwent some changes, though in a different way. While the former two IOs extended along the horizontal axis as presented in Table 7.2 by adding a liberal layer to their otherwise (purely) economic view on education, UNESCO extended along the vertical axis from having a solely collective purpose of education to one that integrated an individual purpose as well. The IO emphasized the notion of citizenship and focused "on educating the whole individual in order to provide the learner with the capacity to fourish" (Vaccari and Gardinier 2019, 78). Lerch and Buckner (2018) show how UNESCO's "ideational underpinning" as regards education has shifted over the decades since its inception in 1945. While for a long time it envisioned education at a collective level as contributing to international peace, an additional layer about individual human development was added over the years. Whereas in the old view education was seen as a collective instrument of socialization for international understanding, the recent shift to the individual proclaims the view of education as a right to personal development. As a result, UNESCO expanded the scope of its discourse so that it would not only focus on those in need due to warfare but also on individuals whose right to education was at risk.

#### Conclusion

The social policy feld of education is populated by different kinds of IOs and different kinds of education ideas. Both have proven to be dynamic. Geographically, the population of education IOs has expanded and today consists of several different types: some IOs have a clear global reach and ambition; most IOs have a transregional, regional, or cultural focus and an accordingly restricted membership bound to certain conditions; several IOs focus on education, often in combination with science and culture; and many IOs deal with education in conjunction with an additional focus they have.

Regarding ideas and discourses, global trends and paradigm shifts have also affected the education ideas of IOs and infuenced which leitmotif had the upper hand in certain periods. For example, the general paradigm shift from Keynesianism to Neoliberalism was also refected in IOs' ideas regarding education. While the neoliberal Washington Consensus surged in the 1980s, a countermovement to the neoliberal agenda emerged in the early 1990s. Recently, the SDGs set a universal framework. Generally, two phases can be distinguished. The frst period spans most of the time until the early 2000s and was characterized by mostly antagonistic competition between the utilitarian and citizenship perspective. Two camps of IOs wrestled to dominate the discourse and gain cognitive authority and legitimacy over education ideas. The second phase started in the early 2000s and was marked by a more integrative approach of both views. While each education IO still maintains a predominant view on the purpose of education, they tend to subsume both idealistic framings under one discourse.

Taking the fndings on population and discourse together, it is remarkable that especially the *derivative* banks which became increasingly involved in education policy no longer envision the sole purpose of education as economic utilitarianism, rather they now also promote (collective) citizenship values. According to their view, integrating the goals of liberal citizenship into the ideational education agenda allows for fostering economic development on one hand. On the other hand, IOs like UNESCO which always strongly emphasized the role of education in disseminating universal norms and values included economic-oriented considerations when referring to the purpose of education. They acknowledge that economic growth contributes to stable societies.

The way in which IOs view education purpose has become increasingly similar. We cannot see that one idea 'wins.' We fnd the puzzling situation of isomorphic polymorphism: while the ideational portfolio of IOs has become increasingly similar, the ideas within their portfolios have become more diverse. These are sound arguments supporting the claims of a world society (Meyer et al. 1997) in the population of education IOs. On the whole, IO ideas seem to converge.

#### References


*Education Policy*, edited by Kerstin Martens, Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, Michael Windzio and Ansgar Weymann, 3–27. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.


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# IOs' Role in Global Social Governance: Family Policy

*Rianne Mahon*

### Introduction

This chapter focuses on family policy as an object of global social governance. Family policy can encompass a very wide scope, including norms governing marriage and separation, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and in-family violence. Such a broad defnition would bring into focus an equally wide range of international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF),1 the Offce of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Organization for Migration

<sup>1</sup> If the chapter were focused on child policy per se, UNICEF would be a central actor but here it plays a more modest role, primarily as a critic of the Bretton Woods institutions' neoliberal adjustment policies in the 1980s.

Research for this chapter was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

R. Mahon (\*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

© The Author(s) 2021 187 K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_8

(IOM), to list just a few. In this chapter, however, I largely follow Saraceno's defnition of family policy, namely: "All those public policies that are explicitly designed to affect the situation of families or individuals in their gender and intergenerational family roles, and to thus have clear, though possibly unintended, consequences for such families and individuals" (2013, 444). Even thus, narrowing the scope of family policies leaves open the range of objectives they may serve, such as dealing with demographic challenges (declining fertility/population aging), tackling child poverty/combating the intergenerational transmission of poverty, investing in human capital formation, encouraging women's labor force participation and promoting gender equality. The main IOs involved in this feld have emphasized various aspects at different times and in different ways, refecting divergent assumptions about the role and nature of families and their organizational mandates.

From the 1990s to 2008, the family policy feld was bifurcated, albeit traversed by a common discourse: social investment. One part, focused on family norms in the North, following the shift from the male breadwinner to the adult earner family with its work-family tensions. Here, the main IOs were the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The second focused on the South and policies targeting children in poor families. Although UNICEF clearly played an important role on the ground, it was the World Bank that took the lead in elaborating and disseminating the core ideas. Since the 2008 crisis, the feld has come together in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that simultaneously address the Global North and South. The dominant discourse is 'inclusive growth', challenged by the more critical discourse on the 'care economy'.

Following an introduction to the analytical framework and the key IOs, the second section discusses the ILO's evolving standards for family supports and then analyzes the two parts of the feld, bringing out the distinct ways in which the OECD and the World Bank interpreted social investment in the family. The third section looks at the adoption of inclusive growth by the ILO, the OECD and the World Bank in the aftermath of the 2008 fnancial crisis. This discursive shift, in combination with renewed attention to gender equality, involved an important 'layering' of new ideas into the organizational discourses developed in the previous period, including elements of the ILO's 'decent work' agenda and the concept of women's unpaid domestic labor.

#### Analytical Framework

Like other chapters in this volume, this chapter combines attention to the global policy feld's organizational environment with an examination of the intrinsic features of the key IOs within that feld. The organizational environment is composed of the confguration of actors—here limited to IOs—in that feld and the rules and belief systems that arise in the broader societal context (Niemann et al., introduction to this volume). Organizational environments structure opportunities and the range of 'legitimate' ideas even for the dominant IOs within them. At the same time, felds are subject to contestation and change. An important part of that struggle is discursive and takes place within a "universe of political discourse", which establishes the legitimate actors within the feld and infuences the range of acceptable policy alternatives (Jenson 1986, 25). While alternative ideas may be introduced to contest the parameters of debate, in normal times such dissident ideas tend to be confned to the margins. Openings, however, may occur in conjunctures marked by the emergence of events that give rise to more wide-ranging debates about what is to be done. At such times, diverse ideas jostle for attention. In the 1990s, the concept of social investment came to structure the way IOs interpreted policies targeting families. Since 2008, inclusive growth has risen to prominence.

In terms of the intrinsic features of the key IOs within a feld, clearly the organization's mandate, membership and internal structure matter. As in previous work, however, I also fnd the concept of organizational discourse(s) particularly useful. Clearly, an organization's mandate and the sediment of its past practices leave their imprint on its culture, but the latter is also subject to change. The concept 'organizational discourse'—that is the "claims encapsulating long term political projects as defned by the organization in question" (Dostal 2004, 445)—is better capable of capturing these important discursive shifts. Organizational discourse thus recognizes that IOs do become involved in new projects that can signifcantly reshape their policy agendas and transform crucial elements of their bureaucratic cultures.

IOs often have more than one organizational discourse, however. As bureaucracies, they factor problems into manageable components. As a result, "different segments of the organization may develop different ways of making sense of the world, experience different local environments, and receive different stimuli from outside; they may also be populated by different mixes of profession or shaped by different historical experiences" (Barnett and Finnemore 1999, 24). Thus, a unit charged with dealing with family policy is likely to develop a distinctive way of seeing, which may (or may not) infuence how other parts of the organization see the world. At the same time, the organization's dominant discourse is likely to have an impact on the way the unit engaged in family policy translates concepts circulating more broadly in its organizational environment.

The ILO can perhaps be considered the frst to make family policy an object of global governance. Founded in the aftermath of World War I, its original mandate was to regulate international labor protection agreements. With the adoption of the Declaration of Philadelphia in 1944, the ILO secured a position as the main UN forum "for social questions associated with post-war reconstruction" (Hughes and Haworth 2011, 12). The ILO has a history of cooperative competition with the OECD on social policy (Leimgruber 2013), and as it became involved in development, it engaged in cooperation (and competition) with the Bretton Woods institutions in the South. Since the late 1990s, the concept 'decent work' has been central to its organizational discourse.

The two IOs that have played a key role in the elaboration of the social investment and inclusive growth discourses are the OECD and the World Bank. The OECD's mandate has been to promote growth through trade and investment liberalization, facilitate cooperation among its members and coordinate the latter's role in promoting development. Growth has remained central to its mandate but its "growth paradigm proved remarkably fexible in adapting to changing circumstances, integrating newly emerging problems and perspectives without changing its basic tenets" (Schmelzer 2016, 14). Although the Economics Department has remained guardian of the growth mandate, the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) elaborated the OECD's social investment approach, which included family policy. DELSA also provides a forum for engaging with the ILO including servicing the G20 and it interacts with the European Directorate for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion.

The World Bank has come to see itself as 'the' knowledge organization in the feld of development (Hammer 2013, 12). Its conception of development has changed over time, from an emphasis on physical infrastructure to poverty alleviation and human capital development under McNamara in the 1970s, neoliberal structural adjustment in the 1980s, and, in the 1990s, the restoration of the Bank's ability to 'see' and mitigate poverty (Vetterlein 2012). From 1996 to 2014, its Washington headquarters was organized into fve thematic networks. The Poverty Reduction and Economic Management network contributed to the elaboration of the Bank's understanding of social investment, in which the early child development group played a key role. While the Bank thus includes diverse ways of seeing, nonetheless its Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC) has been effective in imposing a dominant perspective (Hammer 2013, 30).

The last organization is UN Women, formed in 2010 from the merger of four pre-existing agencies and units. For our purposes, the two most important of the original agencies were the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), established following the First UN Conference on Women. Headquartered in New York, UNIFEM had a network of regional offces through which it provided support to women's organizations as advocates and assisted governments in implementing their international commitments to gender equality.2 Headquartered in Santo Domingo, INSTRAW focused on gender research, training and capacity building. Prior to the formation of UN Women, both organizations had been involved in research and activities around gender and migration. Along with the ILO and the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), UN Women is playing an important role in bringing the concept of the care economy into global discourse.

# Family Policy: From Social Consumption to Social Investment

This section covers the period from the Keynesian-welfare and developmental state forms to the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism has not been without its own contested failures, however. Both the ILO and UNICEF pushed back against the Washington Consensus, opening the way for the World Bank's adoption of a social investment discourse. Through the series of conferences culminating in the Fourth UN Conference on Women (Beijing) and the World Summit for Social Development in 1995, the UN remained an important site for contesting neoliberalism. In particular, the Beijing Platform of Action

<sup>2</sup> https://www.un.org/womenwatch/ianwge/gm\_facts/Unifem.pdf. Accessed February 25, 2020.

established the foundation for the gender equality norm while the World Summit sparked the formation of the ILO's 'decent work' discourse (Hughes and Haworth 2011, 73). Opposition to neoliberalism in the OECD came from units like DELSA and certain member states, as well as through its engagement with European intellectuals who played a central role in forging the Northern variant of the social investment discourse.

In the post-war period, the ILO acted as a global promoter of workers' social and industrial rights. In the 1950s and 1960, it adopted a series of social security conventions to protect the male breadwinner and his dependent family3 against the adverse impact of sickness, invalidity, unemployment or old age. This did not mean that it ignored working women. A series of conventions and recommendations targeting the working mother would help it to fesh out—and then to modify—its family policy. ILO Convention 003 (1919) on Maternity Protection sought to protect married and unmarried mothers from exposure to dangerous work during pregnancy. It also recommended women not work for at least six weeks following confnement, during which they should be provided with a stipend suffcient for the 'full and healthy maintenance' of herself and her child. This convention (Number 103) was revised at the 1952 meeting of the International Labour Conference to include all mothers "irrespective of age, nationality, race or creed" including those performing paid domestic work. The convention was revised again in 2000 (Number 183). Like its predecessors, Convention 183 included provision for maternity leave (now 14 weeks), employment protection, cash and medical benefts, protection from work harmful to mother or child, and established the right to paid time for breastfeeding during working hours. A key addition appeared in the accompanying Recommendation Number 191—that the employed mother *or father* be entitled to parental leave following the expiry of maternity leave.

In 1965, the ILO had passed Recommendation 123 that focused on the problems women face in reconciling their dual family and work responsibilities. While these problems could be addressed by measures affecting all workers (e.g. the reduction of the normal working day), the ILO also encouraged member states to facilitate the development of services, like

<sup>3</sup>A number of these conventions explicitly referred to the male breadwinner. See for example Convention Number 102 Social Security (Minimum Standards) passed in 1952. https:// www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100\_ INSTRUMENT\_ID:312247. Accessed February 25, 2020.

childcare and home helps. In the wake of the frst two UN Conferences for Women, the ILO passed Convention 156 (Equal Opportunity and Equal Treatment of Men and Women Workers with Family Responsibilities) and its associated Recommendation 165 which build on the earlier foundations, including Article 5, reiterating working families' need for supportive services like childcare. Recommendation 165 made it clear that the growing army of precarious workers also needed such supports and included the infrastructural supports so important for easing women's burdens in the barrios and rural areas of the South, such as access to transport, clean water and energy.

Thus, the ILO's conception of the family and the kind of supports it needs evolved in response to changed material circumstances (most notably women's rising labor force participation) and the emergence of women's equality as a global norm. In addition to recognition of the adult earner family, the ILO, with its mandate centered on the world of work, was becoming aware of the need to extend these protections to the expanding informal economies of the South and of 'non-standard work' in the North. Accordingly, under Somavía's directorship, the ILO began to elaborate a new organizational discourse, centered on the concept of 'decent work'. The latter is comprised of four pillars: job creation, rights at work, social protection and social dialogue "with gender equality as a cross-cutting objective".4 Following the 2008 crisis, 'decent work' would begin to be fltered into the discourses of other IOs, as it addressed a blind spot in the latter's social investment discourse: investment in human capital would mean little if not complemented by change on the demand side (i.e. good jobs).

The OECD began to refect on changing family forms through the efforts of its Working Party 6 (WP6) on the Role of Women in the Economy (Mahon 2015). While WP6 and its research on these issues were disbanded in 1998, DELSA took on the task of elaborating the foundations of a new organizational discourse based on an 'after-Keynesian' justifcation for social, including family, policies: the 'active society'. In contrast to both the Keynesian emphasis on sustaining consumption against the risks faced by the male breadwinner and the conservative discourse focused on the need to discipline an 'underclass' grown dependent on social assistance, the active society sought to enable those currently at

<sup>4</sup> https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/decent-work/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020.

the margins, including lone mothers, to participate in the labor market and society by investing in their human capital.

Building on this foundation, *New Orientations for Social Policy* (1994) called for a shift from income maintenance to social policies designed to promote labor market participation. At the same time, it heralded the appearance of the adult worker family. *A Caring World*, prepared for the 1998 social policy ministers' meeting, focused on the adult worker family as a key support for fexible labor markets and efforts to reform social insurance systems geared to the male breadwinner family. States thus needed to facilitate work-family reconciliation via public investment in childcare and family leave policies. Seeing as such 'family-friendly' policy was a new project for DELSA, it launched a major thematic review, *Babies and Bosses* (2001–2007), which would lead to the institutionalization of this new organizational discourse within DELSA and the OECD. While activating lone parents and reforming continental social insurance systems remained part of this agenda, *Babies and Bosses* also came to emphasize support for the adult earner family through quality childcare, shared parental leave and more fexible work arrangements. While elements of the OECD's inclusive growth discourse would later be added to this conception of social investment, they can be seen more as a process of layering onto, rather than divergence from, the core assumptions.

In some respects, the World Bank's embrace of social investment could be viewed as a rediscovery, as the Bank had earlier recognized the importance of human capital development under McNamara's presidency (1968–1980). Largely forgotten following the Bank's embrace of structural adjustment programs, UNICEF's pushback against the latter in the form of 'adjustment with a human face' opened space for the survivors of the McNamara era within the Bank to again push for investment in human capital, with a focus on the poor Southern child. This child-centered version of the discourse began to be institutionalized with the creation of the post of Child Development Specialist in the then-Human Development Network. Its frst occupant, Mary Eming Young, commissioned numerous studies of the issue and convened three international conferences (1996, 2000 and 2005) on Early Childhood Development (ECD). In the name of ECD, the Bank also became a leading proponent of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), which typically target mothers in poor families who are offered cash benefts in exchange for ensuring that their children get health checks and stay in school.

Thus, the Bank's version of the social investment discourse held to the neoliberal thrust of the original Washington Consensus, while conceding a role for the 'right kind' of social policy. There the Bank took a narrower view than the OECD, focusing on very poor children to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Although it was prepared to offer fnancial support for narrowly targeted investments in young children's education, health and nutrition, local governments were expected to free up revenue for this by disinvesting social programs seen to beneft those employed in the (shrinking) formal economy. In clear contrast to the ILO and the OECD, women appeared not as workers but as human capital in the making (girls), or as mothers. Traditional maternal practices were blamed for children's malnutrition (Psacharopoulos 1995, 31), and poor families were generally faulted for failing to provide suffcient cognitive stimulation.

This apparent split within the family policy feld between a genderresponsive social investment approach, focused on adult earner families in the North, and a blend of neoliberalism with traditional views of the family, focused on poor children in the South, can be somewhat misleading, however. To be sure, early childhood education and care have been incorporated into policy agendas in Latin America, framed in part by the World Bank's discourse but the ILO and UNIFEM were also active in carrying their organizational discourses to the South (Blofeld and Martinez-Franzoni 2015, 28).5 Thus, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the ILO has had an impact on maternity leave policies in the region (Blofeld and Martinez-Franzoni, 2015). UNIFEM used its connections with national women's machineries and women's organizations to support dissemination of the UN's gender equality norm (Phillips and Cole 2009, 191). The UNFPA and the German aid agency brought together Latin American feminist scholars to produce an important volume on the tension between changing family norms and policy practices (Mora et al. 2006) while the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has disseminated ideas more in tune with the OECD's discourse than the World Bank's (Mahon 2018).

<sup>5</sup>They do not identify the Bank as the key IO here but their description of the dominant frame—early development of the human capital of poor children—is more consistent with the Bank's discourse than that of the OECD or the ILO.

# Inclusive Growth and the Care Economy: Implications for Family Policy Discourses

The 2007 food crisis and the 2008 fnancial crisis opened a new contested failure of neoliberal orthodoxies. While absolute poverty (in the South) remained of concern, a series of studies by the leading IOs—World Bank (2006), ILO (2008) and OECD (2008, 2011)*—*lent credence to the arguments of critical social movements that the top one percent were capturing the lion's share of growth dividends. The (re)discovery of inequality, in turn, helped to get other IOs to incorporate the ILO's 'decent work' agenda and created room for dissemination of the idea of inclusive growth. At the same time, while feminists brought the concept of women's unpaid domestic labor to the fore, the Stiglitz, Fitoussi and Sen (2009) report gave it added prominence by calling for a broadening of income measures to include unpaid care work. The OECD and the World Bank reports on gender equality (2012) also acknowledged women's unpaid domestic labor. These developments paved the way for the global adoption of the three Rs—recognize, reward and redistribute unpaid domestic labor—which would subsequently be brought together with the idea of decent work in the broader concept of the care economy. All of these discursive developments held implications for thinking about family policy.

These institutional and discursive changes in the environment are refected in the IOs' organizational discourses. All three IOs have embraced inclusive growth, along with elements of the ILO's decent work discourse. All three have come to recognize the importance of women's unequal share of unpaid domestic work. At the same time, each translates these into terms that modify its pre-existing organizational discourse.

The crisis provided an opening for the ILO to get other IOs to recognize that informality and precarious work were making it more diffcult for families to earn suffcient incomes. Prior to the crisis, the ILO had also begun to elaborate an additional strategy—a global social protection foor6—to address this. More specifcally, the foor meant national commitments to address important family needs: essential health care, including maternity care, that meets the criteria of availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality; basic income security for all children, including

<sup>6</sup>For a detailed analysis of the development and dissemination of this idea, see Deacon (2013).

access to nutrition, education, care and any other necessary goods and services; income security for active age adults unable to earn adequate incomes due to maternity, illness, unemployment or disability; and basic income security for older persons. If implemented, the foors would help families currently excluded from social insurance schemes by informality or precarity to provide for their needs across the life cycle.

Elsewhere I have described the broader changes to the OECD's dominant organizational discourse (Mahon 2019). A key change was the adoption of the New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC), which posed a direct challenge to the orthodox ideas of the hitherto dominant Economic Department. NAEC's inclusive growth can be seen as enhancing the centrality of DELSA's organizational discourse within the OECD as a whole, as social investment remains central to the NAEC's conception: "a reorientation away from a risk-only approach to welfare provision, towards a life-long enabling platform that furnishes individuals with capacity enhancing assets in the form of human and social capital, good health and active support in labour markets…that builds on strong foundations for learning and adaptation for life and through life" (OECD 2017a, 5).

This does not mean that the OECD failed to incorporate new ideas into its organizational discourse. Inequality has received considerable attention since the publication of *Growing Unequal*, and this concern has been institutionalized through the creation of the OECD's Centre for Equality and Opportunity. At the same time, the latter's work refects the OECD's continued commitment to the adult earner family. For instance, *Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class* (2018a) reiterates the lessons learned through *Babies and Bosses.* It calls for measures to promote women's fulltime employment, noting that in contrast to dual-income families, one and a half earner families make up a growing share of lower-middle-income families.

The OECD's conception of the gender-equal family now includes recognition of women's unpaid labor. The OECD has also taken on elements of the ILO's decent work agenda, most notably through its renewed Jobs Strategy, *Good Jobs for All in a Changing World of Work* (2018b). This shift is also refected in its ongoing studies of child policy (OECD 2015, 2016). While continuing to stress encouraging parental employment (preferably full-time) through the provision of appropriate supports (paid leave, quality childcare), measures to support "the creation of stable, high quality jobs that are both suffcient and accessible to the lower-skilled parents" have been added onto this (Thévenon and Manfredi 2018, 11). In other words, it is not suffcient to enable adult family members to work; they also need to be able to fnd and secure good jobs.

While the family discourse that built on the Babies and Bosses foundation focused on families with children, the OECD has come to recognize that eldercare is also an important issue that families, especially women, have to deal with. Here again, socio-economic and gender inequality are of concern. Thus, the background documents prepared for its high-level conference on policies for equal aging noted that countries with higher levels of social protection for long-term care had lower rates of informal care and thus less gender inequality (2018c). The main message, however, remained the importance of supporting the adult earner family: "While many countries need to improve long-term care supports and continue pension reforms to make retirement income systems fnancially and socially sustainable, policy efforts to limit old-age inequalities cannot rely only on measures targeted to older people. It is more effcient to address socioeconomic inequalities when they arise rather than remedy their consequences, including gender inequalities, which tend to widen with old age" (OECD 2018c, 6).7

The changing environment was also refected in the Bank's discourse and the Bank, in turn, contributed to those changes. The Growth Commission (2006–2008) played a role both in the adoption—and the wider dissemination—of inclusive growth. The Commission's report differed, however, in important ways from the way the Bank came to translate inclusive growth. For instance, while the adoption of inclusive growth meant for the Bank the addition of 'shared prosperity' defned as improving the incomes of the bottom 40 percent, the Commission had also proposed dealing with those at the top by sharing the wealth through the tax system (Commission 2008, 62). Although both versions emphasized investment in human capital, the Commission noted that such investment would not bear fruit without complementary development of the demand for quality labor (Commission 2008, 37).

More specifcally, the Bank's conception of inclusive growth continued the earlier focus on investment in human capital, with a particular emphasis on the early years. One whole chapter of *The Changing Nature of Work* focuses on lifelong learning, in which early child development is assigned a foundational role: "The most effective way to acquire the skills demanded by the changing nature of work is to start early. Early investment in

<sup>7</sup> See also Preventing Ageing Unequally (2017).

nutrition, health, social protection, and education lay strong foundations for the future acquisition of cognitive and socio-behavioral skills. They also make future skills acquisition more resilient to uncertainty. Early childhood investments are an important way to improve equality of opportunity" (World Bank 2019, 73). Early child development programs continue to be given pride of place in the report's 'new social contract'.

Like the OECD, the Bank has had to deal with the issue of demand for labor. Its 2013 World Development Report, *Jobs*, discussed the ILO's concept of "decent work" (World Bank 2013, 15–17). However, while it agreed that those in the informal sector needed a voice, it did not see collective bargaining as the way to achieve this and cautioned against too stringent labor market regulations. Its later report, *The World of Work,* however, nods in the direction of the ILO's social protection foor where it appears under the rubric of 'progressive universalism' (2019, 106). Progressive universalism would involve extending coverage to all in the form of a basic level of social assistance, to be complemented by basic social insurance covering 'contingencies' like maternity. A somewhat more generous social insurance system would be mandated for formal sector workers, supplemented by a 'nudged' or third-tier voluntary system.

Women also feature as more than just mothers and girls in the Bank's inclusive growth discourse. The Bank's 2012 World Development Report, *Gender Equality and Development*, portrayed investment in gender equality as 'smart economics'. The Bank's 2016–2023 Gender strategy, *Gender Equality, Poverty Reduction and Inclusive Growth*, reiterated the 2012 report's arguments for investing in women and girls as smart development policy: "increased women's labor force participation and earnings are associated with reducing poverty and faster growth; income, employment and assets empower women, which benefts men, children and society as a whole" (World Bank 2016, 12). Now programs like center-based childcare are presented as a 'double win', helping increase girls and women's engagement in education and productive activities while promoting early development and lifelong learning for young children (World Bank 2016, 38). Women's unequal share of unpaid domestic work is also recognized and warrants redistribution by including men and boys and through the provision of care services, including eldercare. The 2019 World Development Report recognizes that women's informal caregiving interferes with their engagement in the labor market and goes on to note that "Effective social care entails reimagining a role for the state in reducing involuntary unemployment by providing services in several areas. These include childcare, disability and old-age care, psychological support for the long-term unemployed, support for social kitchens, and rehabilitation…" (World Bank 2019, 126).

This raises the broader question of the 'care economy', a concept which the ILO and UN Women have helped to put on the agenda. As Ilkkaracan notes, the care economy "entails the production and consumption of goods and services necessary for the physical, social, mental and emotional well-being of care-dependent groups, such as children, the elderly, the ill and people with disabilities, as well as healthy, prime working age adults" (2018, 8). UNRISD's pioneering study, the Political and Social Economy of Care (2006–09), can be credited for going beyond the 'care crisis' in the North to show that care is also an issue for the South. Much of that care continues to be carried out in the home as unpaid labor by family members or the low-paid labor of domestic workers. Its conclusions presaged the 3Rs, arguing for (1) recognition and guaranteed rights of caregivers and receivers; (2) distribution of the costs more evenly across society; (3) the support of professional, decently paid and compassionate forms of care (UNRISD 2016). Investing in the development of quality care services provided by workers who receive fair wages can offer both direct supports to families and generate a substantial number of new 'decent' jobs if, as the ILO argues, the high road to the care economy is taken. To this the ILO would add voice (or representation) for care workers, care recipients and unpaid caregivers (ILO 2018, xliii). Moreover, as the ILO report, *Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work*, notes, such jobs are not likely to be replaced by robots given the relational nature of care work (ILO 2018, xxvii). In other words, the care economy holds the potential for generating decent work while providing families with the supports they need.

In the *WDR 2019* report, the Bank seems to recognize this potential, but in other documents, it is clearly looking to the market to create these jobs. Thus, its gender strategy notes, "Governments can establish supportive business practices to foster the development of care services and intervene to encourage greater involvement of fathers in childcare and men in care for sick and elderly dependents. The private sector can invest in care services for better business outcomes and promote approaches that help workers of both sexes balance their work and family responsibilities" (2016, 44). Through the International Finance Corporation, the Bank has developed the 'business case' for such employer-supported childcare (IFC 2017).

The very labor-intensive character of much of care work, however, means that it is diffcult to combine private, for-proft provision with decent work and decent care. The 'gold standard' is most closely approximated in the Nordic countries, where such services are typically both publicly fnanced and publicly provided (Esping-Andersen 1999). To be sure, not all states currently possess the capacity to provide quality care with decent working conditions nor are they likely to do so in the near future. Nevertheless "if NGOs, social enterprises or businesses are to act as the primary institutional framework for social provisioning, the infrastructure still needs to be fnanced by the state" (Ilkkaracan 2018, 38). To this might be added the need for "fscal space which would mean abandoning austerity-oriented macro-economic policies and investing in human capabilities while relieving women of unpaid work in the family and generating (decent) employment" (UN Women 2019, chapter 5).

#### Conclusions

This chapter has traced shifts in global social policy discourses directed at families, from the ILO's post-war conventions that supported the development of social security for the male breadwinner family through to the current family as it appears in the inclusive growth and care economy discourses. The original split in the global family policy environment refected the post-war division between the North and the South. The crises of the Keynesian-welfare and developmental state forms opened the way for neoliberalism. Although neoliberalism may have become dominant, it was challenged and subject to change. The OECD developed a concept of social policy focused on investing in the adult earner family. In response to UNICEF's arguments and inspired by US research on policies to help poor families, the World Bank, in turn, rediscovered poverty and investment in human capital, especially that of the child, as a solution in the 1990s.

The ILO and UNRISD began to challenge these two variants of social investment as the new millennium dawned. The ILO's concept of decent work highlighted an important lacuna: investment in developing human capital requires an environment favorable to the creation of good jobs, yet labor and commodity market deregulation were generating the opposite. The ILO's idea of a global social protection foor addressed another aspect of the same phenomenon—the growth of non-standard and informal economy jobs excluded a growing number of families from traditional social protections. In the meantime, feminists were pushing for the recognition of women's unpaid domestic labor. At the same time, research within the key IOs was beginning to document the growth of inequality within as well as between countries. The food crisis of 2007 and the fnancial crisis of 2008 opened the way for these ideas to be incorporated in the discourses of the OECD and the World Bank and to do so in ways that blurred the old North-South division. The seeds of a conception of a care economy, an idea that calls for a more radical rethinking of how to support families, were planted by UNRISD and the ILO and UN Women have become its champions

There are a few important issues that this chapter has not been able to deal with. First, while the nuclear, adult earner family may be the new norm, it is by no means the only form. In some parts of the world, the extended family remains important (UN Women 2019, chapter 2). This is important to bear in mind, especially given the increase in transnational families and the transnational care chains to which these have given rise, as mothers and/or fathers migrate to secure family livelihoods, leaving children in the care of others, often other family members. IOs like the OECD, the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have grasped aspects of these care chains, albeit in a fragmented manner (Mahon, 2020). With its focus on decent work and the care economy, the ILO has done better and UN Women's (2019) most recent report devotes a whole chapter to families on the move. The chapter has also neglected the heteronormative assumptions that often lie at the heart of global family policy discourses. In this context, it is worth noting the 2018 OECD Ministerial Policy Statement, Social Policy for Shared Prosperity, which recognized "the continued challenges faced by historically disadvantaged groups in our countries, including racial and ethnic minorities; indigenous communities; migrants, refugees, and other displaced persons; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people; older persons; and people with disabilities" (OECD 2018d, 3).

A second set of issues has to deal with the resources needed to realize the promises of 'inclusive growth' and the care economy. Clearly, this involves challenging the austerity policies adopted by many countries, often with the support of the IMF and the World Bank. It would also involve dealing with the issue of tax avoidance, especially by large corporations like Amazon and Google as well as the very wealthy. In this respect, the OECD/G20 Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Proft Sharing (BEPS), which has garnered offcial support from over 125 countries, is potentially important.8

#### References


International Financial Corporation/World Bank Group. 2017. *Tackling Child Care: The Business Case for Employer Supported Child Care.* Washington: International Financial Corporation/World Bank Group.

Jenson, Jane. 1986. "Gender and Reproduction or Babies and the State". *Studies in Political Economy* 20 (9): 9–46.

<sup>8</sup> http://www.oecd.org/tax/treaties/multilateral-convention-to-implement-tax-treatyrelated-measures-to-prevent-beps.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020.


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# Disability as a 'New' Global Social Theme: The Role of International Organizations in an Expanding Global Policy Field

*Johannes Schuster and Nina Kolleck*

#### Introduction

Disability as a global social policy issue has gained increasing importance during recent decades. Largely responsible for this development has been a shift in the general conceptualization of disability—from a medical perspective that views disability as a person's limitations to the perception of disability as limitations imposed by society. After many years of struggle for recognition, the adoption in 2006 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) by the United Nations (UN) represented a seminal step in establishing disability as a human rights issue. Due to this new acknowledgment of disability as a global social policy issue, a

J. Schuster (\*) • N. Kolleck

Institute of Political Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: johannes.schuster@uni-leipzig.de; nina.kolleck@uni-leipzig.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 207

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_9

global organizational feld1 with a variety of different international actors has emerged around the topic, with strong involvement by International Organizations (IOs).

Today, global policy is no longer made by nation states alone but includes a heterogeneous set of different public and private stakeholders, such as IOs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Jakobi 2009). The concept of global governance underlines the infuence of non-state actors in the interplay with state actors in relation to a specifc policy (Rosenau 1995; Zürn 2018). Moreover, the diverse actors of an organizational feld are interdependent, which means that they build networks to form alliances and disseminate information in order to strengthen their positions (Adam and Kriesi 2007). IOs often have a particular mandate that allows them to act in a frame predefned by their member states. However, public administration scholars have agreed that IOs and their administrations exert additional political infuence by shaping discourses and setting agendas for specifc topics (Barnett and Finnemore 1999; Bauer et al. 2017). This means that the traditional principal-agent model with leading nation states as *principals* creating international regimes as their *agents* that work on predefned problems—is outdated in some felds of social policy, making it particularly interesting to investigate the role of IOs.

An investigation of the population of IOs in a specifc social policy feld needs to consider two approaches: the organizational environment and the intrinsic features (Abbott et al. 2016). Whereas the organizational environment encompasses the general characteristics of a policy feld (i.e., the beliefs and norms) as well as the involved actors and their relationships (i.e., the social networks), the intrinsic features relate to the inherent characteristics of organizations (such as membership rules and thematic orientation) and the way these defne an organization's scope of action (Niemann et al. in this volume). As there is still only limited knowledge about the population of IOs in disability policy, the aim of this chapter is to introduce disability as a global social policy theme and to identify important actors, with a particular focus on IOs.2 First, we give an overview

1We refer to the concept of *organizational feld* as 'the aggregate of actors' of a policy feld, which further includes the rules and belief systems, as well as the relational networks that arise in the broader societal context (see Niemann et al. in this volume).

2Most studies on the topic of global disability policy and the CRPD, which will also be discussed in this chapter, either focus on the historical development or describe the content and *status quo* of the CRPD (e.g., Della Fina et al. 2017; Arnardóttir and Quinn 2009; of the policy feld and its development from a global perspective and present the main IOs in terms of their involvement in disability policy. In order to approach a mapping of the organizational feld of global disability policy, we identify the most central actors and their connections based on Twitter data. We then present the main topics discussed in the feld, followed by a short conclusion of the chapter.

## Background of (Global) Disability Policy Discourse and Involvement of IOs

In general, disability policy is a comparably novel topic of social policy. Before the twentieth century, persons with disabilities were mostly hidden from society, and it took governments until the end of the Second World War to explicitly address the needs and rights of disabled persons through policies. According to Drake (1999, 36–41), domestic disability policies can be evaluated along a spectrum from policymaking that denies disability rights, to an approach that seeks to identify individual disadvantages in order to provide necessary services for adjustment, to a social approach where disabled people are accorded the rights to participate in society as equal citizens. For a better understanding of disability in both national and global context, two main concepts can be distinguished: the medical model3 and the social model of disability (Kayess and French 2008; Harpur 2012). In this section, the two models are explained and related to IOs, thereby partly describing the intrinsic features of these IOs. Subsequently, an additional model—the economic model—is presented and the role of regional organizations is briefy discussed.

#### *The Medical Model and WHO*

The medical model of disability conceives of disability as "a personal tragedy" and focuses on the "affiction caused by the particular condition or impairment and the provision of cure, treatment, care and protection to change the person so that they may be assimilated to the social norm" (Kayess and French 2008, 5). Thus, in this model the limitations are

Kayess and French 2008) and disability policy (e.g., Barnes and Mercer 2004; Oliver 1996), but lack more detailed information about actors and processes in global disability governance.

<sup>3</sup>Other scholars, such as Oliver (1996) or Priestley (1998), refer to the medical model as the "individual model", but describe the same concept.

caused by the impairment itself, neglecting the role of the social environment and the barriers it builds. In social policymaking, this conception has led to disability policies that categorized persons with disabilities according to their disadvantages and that urged them to adjust according to their unique and individual needs, for example, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Person's Act (1970) and the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) in the UK (Priestley 2000) or the Rehabilitation Act (1973) in the USA (Barnes 2011). This model enhanced welfare policies to support the disabled individuals in their adjustment, such as accommodating them in separate houses or providing fnancial support and care (Priestley 2000). Inherent in such an approach is an increased expenditure on health care and research (Jeon and Haider-Markel 2001). These attempts created a whole new professional system of welfare that aimed to rehabilitate persons with disabilities. This, in turn, exempted persons with disabilities from (labor-related) duties and established and institutionalized a climate of societal segregation (Drake 1999).

The one IO that is closely intertwined with the medical model is the World Health Organization (WHO). In order to establish universal defnitions for different forms of disability and impairment, WHO published the *International Classifcation of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps* (ICIDH) in 1980. The document was divided into three categories, impairments, disabilities, and handicaps, with concise defnitions for each (WHO 1980, 27–29). The classifcation system was used for the assignment and provision of services and benefts. This focus of WHO on the medical model lasted until the beginning of the twenty-frst century. The organization then replaced the ICIDH with its *International Classifcation of Functioning Disability and Health* (ICF) and thereby adopted—at least to some extent—the social model (Barnes 2011). Other activities of WHO include the community-based rehabilitation guidelines—published in close cooperation with other inter-governmental and non-governmental actors (e.g., the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNESCO, or the International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC)) which mainly cover the provision of medical support (Lang et al. 2011), or the World Report on Disability, published together with the World Bank, which provides a comprehensive outline of the *status quo* around persons with disabilities and provides suggestions for all sorts of different stakeholders (WHO 2011).

#### *The Social Model and the UN*

In contrast to the individual model, the social model of disability states that "contingent social conditions rather than inherent biological limitations constrain individuals' abilities and create a disability category" (Stein 2007, 85). This concept—which was promoted by a growing disability rights movement that started to emerge in the 1960s, particularly in the US and the UK—shifts the focus from the impairment itself to the society as the cause of barriers (Kayess and French 2008). The movement was substantially led by the British disability rights network known as the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, which rejected more mainstream ideas in order to enforce the acknowledgment of the social model (Shakespeare 2010). This sociopolitical or rights-based approach to disability policymaking implied that the adjustment of the physical environments of disabled persons to their needs was what was necessary, rather than a "medical repair" of the concerned persons themselves (Jeon and Haider-Markel 2001, 216).

In tracing the development of the disability rights movement and thus the emergence and acceptance of the social model, we can see that they are closely interlinked with the UN (Degener and Begg 2017; Stein 2007). The frst non-binding declarations, such as the Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons in 1971 and the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons in 1975, still tended to emphasize individuals' medical needs. In contrast, by declaring the year 1981 the offcial International Year of Disabled Persons—which was succeeded by the International Decade of Disabled Persons (from 1983 to 1992)—the UN gave particular attention to the rights and interests of persons with disabilities (Stein 2007). A seminal step was then made with the adoption of the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in 1993, which although only "soft law and legally unenforceable" (Stein 2007, 89) nevertheless represented an initial UN instrument that exhorted member states "to ensure the equalization of opportunities for disabled persons" (Stein 2007, 89). Until today, the Standard Rules are conceived as a leading watershed in the development of global disability rights. Finally, at the beginning of the new millennium, disability rights successively became a human rights issue worthy of their own convention, having been promoted by individual states (such as Mexico and New Zealand) as well as scientifc studies which looked at the neglect of disabled persons in the core human rights conventions beyond the medical perspective. The convention itself was discussed and drafted by an Ad Hoc Committee which was established in December 2001 and included signifcant involvement by civil society organizations. After a process of eight sessions, the fnal document was adopted in December 2006 and came into force in May 2007 (Degener and Begg 2017).

Today, the UN is the driving force in global disability policy. The implementation of the Convention is monitored by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is located at the Offce of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Signatories are obliged to submit reports on the progress of the implementation of the CRPD every four years. The Committee then evaluates the reports and returns general observations, including recommendations for further implementation. Moreover, the main tasks of the Committee comprise the preparation of General Comments on specifc issues of the Convention as well as the examination of individual complaints (Uerpmann-Wittzack 2018). It should be noted that as well as the Committee's other tasks, the development of the reports is exercised in close consultation with different nonstate actors, foremost disabled persons' organizations (DPOs).

Besides the Committee and its administration, the main focal point of the CRPD and disability rights at the UN is the CRPD secretariat, which is located at the UN headquarters in New York. The secretariat falls within the Division for Inclusive Social Development (DISD) of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). The secretariat is established to promote the international normative framework on disability, to support other inter-governmental bodies concerning disability rights issues and to service the annual Conference of States Parties (COSP) (UN Enable 2020). The COSP represents—for human rights treaties in particular—an innovative mandate and provides a forum for constant exchange and discussion between member states, IOs, and civil society organizations (de Búrca et al. 2013).

However, the promotion of disability rights in the UN is not limited to the main bodies, but also brings together other UN divisions and specialized agencies, such as the UN Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank. UNESCO is an offcial supporter of the CRPD and has adopted an action plan including "research and evidence-based data collection, development of policies and strategies on inclusion of persons with disabilities, building an enabling environment and raising awareness, development of appropriate tools for instruction and capacity building" (UNESCO 2020). In doing so, UNESCO places a strong emphasis on the promotion of inclusive information and communication technologies (ICTs), as can be seen from the publication of model policies for inclusive ICTs to support UNESCO member states in the implementation of specifc issues concerning disability policy (Watkins 2014). Whereas the focus of UNESCO is linked strongly to the CRPD, UNICEF's concern with disability rights has been an integral part of their work since the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (see also Holzscheiter in this volume). Predominantly focusing on the rights of children with disabilities as "one of the most marginalized and excluded groups in society" (UNICEF 2020), UNICEF follows three disability goals. First, it commits itself to being "an inclusive organization for all" (UNICEF 2020), stating that the organizational staff includes an adequate number of persons with disabilities, but also undertakes efforts to raise awareness on disability issues. Second, it aims to "develop leadership on the rights of children with disabilities and build capacity among [its] staff and [its] partners" (UNICEF 2020). This means engaging in collaborative relationships with other UN stakeholders as well as actors from civil society, academia, or the private sector. The third goal is to "mainstream disability across all of our policies and programs, both in development and humanitarian action" (UNICEF 2020). UNICEF mostly implements programs in different countries, predominantly in the Global South, in order to support them in the implementation of the CRPD.

As one of the leading IOs in the global social policy feld, the World Bank is also considering disability. Its goal is to "integrate disability into development through its analytical work, data and good-practice policies" and to include disability-related issues in its operations (World Bank 2020). Besides the *World Report on Disability* (WHO 2011) that has been published together with WHO to give a comprehensive image of the global *status quo* in disability policy, the World Bank has a focus on the inclusion of disability and disabled persons in its own work. As mentioned in its *Disability Inclusion and Accountability Framework*, the guiding principles in the World Bank's disability-inclusive work are based on the CRPD and encompass nondiscrimination and equality, accessibility, inclusion and participation, as well as partnership and collaboration (McClain-Nhlapo et al. 2018). This suggests a rights-based perspective of the organization that is in slight contrast to its previous collaboration on this issue with WHO.

#### *The Economic Model*

A third dimension of disability policy that can be found in the literature has emerged in close relation to the shift from the medical to the social model and, therefore, has implications for the understanding and setup of the global disability policy feld: an economic defnition. From this perspective, disability is understood as a "health-related inability or a person's functional limitations on the amount or kind of work that disabled people can perform", with associated calls for policy solutions to remove these barriers (Jeon and Haider-Markel 2001, 216). Consequently, disability policymaking is supposed to aim at an inclusion of persons with disability into the labor market in order to have them contribute to the economic success of a country. Moving toward the establishment of such inclusive environments—even if most of them have not yet been implemented successfully—implies a shift from a welfare system for disabled people to a 'workfare' system (Peck 2001). The underlying assumption of this approach is that citizens who beneft from the welfare system need to contribute by participating in the labor market—a system of conditionality that is increasingly implemented by Western welfare states (Geiger 2017; Soldatic and Chapman 2010). The IO that exerts a particular infuence on the development of such a model is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In a collection of country reports from 2003, the OECD discusses opportunities to integrate disabled people into society in general as well as ways to secure their income by building inclusive structures in the labor market (OECD 2003). Another series of books published between 2007 and 2010 called *Sickness, Disability and Work: Breaking the Barriers* also examined different country case studies according to the inclusiveness of their employment structure for persons with disabilities (OECD 2010). A similar agenda is set by the ILO, which has continuously extended its instruments in regard to the rights of persons with disabilities. The ILO adopted a frst recommendation concerning Vocational Rehabilitation of the Disabled (R099) in 1955 in order to "meet the employment needs of the individual disabled person and to use manpower resources to the best advantage" (ILO 1955). The recommendation was then renewed in 1983 (R168) and led to the technical Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (Disabled Persons) Convention (C159), which entered into force in 1985.

#### *Regional Organizations*

The global disability policy feld not only consists of IOs but also of regional organizations. As the frst-ever supranational organization to sign an international human rights treaty, namely the CRPD, the European Union (EU) has a disability strategy that addresses eight priority areas: accessibility, participation, equality, employment, education and training, social protection, health, and external action (European Commission 2010). One main objective of the EU is the collection of comprehensive information and data on the implementation status of the CRPD in its member states. For instance, it has launched the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, an independent organization that provides information about the schooling of persons with special needs in the member states. Even broader thematically is the Academic Network of European Disability Experts, which offers a database summarizing the implementation status of the Convention in regard to the most important topics, such as accessibility, education, or employment.

There is signifcant variation in the ways in which other regional IOs address disability rights. Two examples stand out because of their explicit strategies and policies. The African Union introduced two African Decades of Disabled Persons (2000–2009 and 2010–2019), which led to the recent adoption in January 2018 of an additional Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The main purpose of the Protocol is "to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human and people's rights by all persons with disabilities, and to ensure respect for their inherent dignity" (African Union 2018, 5). Similarly, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) adopted the Enabling Masterplan 2025 in November 2018 to mainstream the rights of persons with disabilities. This is conceived as an additional framework in support of the implementation of the CRPD in ASEAN member states (ASEAN 2018).

# Mapping the Global Disability Policy Field Based on Twitter Data

As we have already shown in this chapter, the population of IOs in the feld of disability policy is diverse and contains many different organizations. Besides these international and supranational actors, the global disability policy sphere also comprises a variety of NGOs, mostly DPOs, that are engaged in the advocacy of disability rights. During the disability rights movements in the late twentieth century, these organizations played a crucial role in achieving self-advocacy, using international advocacy networks to share ideas and information (Priestley 2007). Moreover, in the context of the CRPD, DPOs have had an infuential role since the drafting process, with signifcant involvement in the meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee (Degener and Begg 2017; Stein and Lord 2009). The close interaction between the member states of the Convention with stakeholders from civil society is also explicitly mentioned in Article 32 (United Nations 2006) and is further considered in the monitoring process of the Committee. Moreover, despite the differences in disability concepts and policies, the UN endeavors to establish programs that combine forces for the promotion of disability rights outside and inside the organization. For instance, the Inter-Agency Support Group for the CRPD was established in 2006 in order to integrate disability into the UN system, and the UN Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities brings together different stakeholders—including the ILO, UNESCO, or WHO as well as civil society organizations, such as the International Disability Alliance or the IDDC—to advance disability rights on a global scale.

Consequently, it can be assumed that IOs and DPOs use means of soft governance—that is, institutional and discursive resources—to diffuse and implement the standards set in the CRPD (see Niemann et al. in this volume). We argue that in order to do so, they build networks to collectively shape discourses around disability rights. This makes an analysis of such networks a promising approach to better understand the global disability policy feld. However, mapping global networks that comprise a diverse set of global actors is challenging (Dicken et al. 2001). In order to address this challenge and to acknowledge the increasing relevance of new ICTs for the exchange of information, we draw on Twitter data.

The social media platform Twitter is used for real-time information and discussion and has gained increasing importance in politics over recent years (Weller 2014). Different political actors contribute to the platform to promote their ideas, for mobilization or organization (Dubois and Gaffney 2014; Guo and Saxton 2014; Conover et al. 2012). Users can participate in issue-specifc discussions by adding a so-called hashtag ('#') to a word (e.g., #crpd or #disability). Moreover, users can interact with other users by mentioning them (i.e., placing the @-symbol in front of a username so that the user in question receives a notifcation), replying to them (a mention at the beginning of a tweet), or retweeting them (republishing another user's tweet). By collecting tweets on a specifc topic and extracting the interactions made in these tweets, issue-specifc Twitter networks can be mapped.

For the present analysis, we obtained Twitter data that were published during the COSPs to the CRPD in the years 2013 to 2017. To identify references to the CRPD and to disability policy, we fltered for specifc hashtags such as #crpd, #cosp, or #disability. In total, we identifed 44,545 tweets, which led to an overall network consisting of 16,712 accounts (socalled nodes) and 38,737 interactions (edges). We used techniques of social network analysis (SNA) to map the network and the relations between the different actors and to identify central actors (Borgatti et al. 2013). SNA is particularly suited to exploring the 'hidden infuence' that actors exert in a given organizational feld because it shifts the unit of analysis from individual attributes of actors to their embeddedness in social relations (Jörgens et al. 2016; Kolleck et al. 2017).

In order to present an overall impression of the network, Fig. 9.1 shows the network with labels for the 20 most central actors according to eigenvector centrality. This measure represents the centrality of a node in relation to the centrality of the nodes it is directly connected to. It can therefore be seen as an indicator of an actor's popularity in a network (Borgatti et al. 2013). The size of the labels is proportional to the eigenvector centrality value. The fgure indicates that the most central nodes belong to the UN, namely the offcial UN account, the UN entity for the empowerment of women, the account of the secretariat of the CRPD (UN Enable) and UNICEF. Other UN accounts that appear among the top 20 are directly linked to the division and department to which the CRPD is assigned (i.e., the Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD)4 in the UNDESA) or represent the offcial Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities. In addition, the International Disability Alliance and the Ecuadorian president, Lenín Moreno, show high centrality values. Other central actors are mostly NGOs and DPOs or their representatives, such as the IDDC, Lumos, the European Disability Forum (EDF), or Catherine Naughton (EDF Director). The clustering of these nodes in the network suggests that they are closely interconnected. Aside from that, the lack of other IOs in this list is quite remarkable, even though for the most part they are not explicitly concerned with disability

<sup>4</sup>Today, the DSPD is part of the DISD.

#### 218 J. SCHUSTER AND N. KOLLECK

**Fig. 9.1** The overall twitter network of the COSPs 2013–2017

rights (see Section "Background of (Global) Disability Policy Discourse and Involvement of IOs").

Figure 9.2 provides a reduced network containing only the interactions between IO-related accounts. In this network, the size of the nodes represents the eigenvector centrality. As could be observed in the overall network, the most central nodes in the IO-IO interaction network belong to the aforementioned UN agencies. According to the graph, one particularly prominent organization is the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialized agency that is established to facilitate global

**Fig. 9.2** Twitter network of the most central IOs during the COSPs 2013–2017

connectivity. This is not surprising given that the organization is concerned with ICTs and the analyzed data were created using ICTs. Hence, it can be assumed that the ITU has a particular interest in appearing prominently in online social media. Rather remarkable is the position of WHO and the OECD. Though among the most infuential actors in global disability policy, they seem to be excluded from the Twitter network. However, the extent to which this is due to an actual lack of interaction with other relevant actors or rather a general reluctance to engage in social media activity cannot be ascertained from this data.

When looking at the IO-NGO interactions (see Fig. 9.3), we fnd similar results to the overall network. Aside from UN accounts directly related to disability rights, the DPOs hold the most central positions in the network (in regard to both the centrality value and the actual position). Overall, it can be observed from this analysis of Twitter data that both IOs and NGOs use Twitter to exchange information. The most central actors in the network are UN agencies directly related to disability policy as well as DPOs. This suggests that those actors with an explicit agenda for disability policy use the available channels—including online platforms—to promote disability rights, whereas the topic is less important to others. However, it must frst be noted that the data was collected in the context of a UN event, making it more likely for UN actors to participate, and second, that social media platforms are still used to different extents by offcial political actors. For this reason, inferences from these results must be made with caution.

**Fig. 9.3** Twitter network of central IOs and NGOs

#### Main Topics in Global Disability Policy

The presentation of IOs in the feld has already shown that disability is often discussed in conjunction with other forms of discrimination and can hardly be discussed separately from other social and development policy issues. Hence, in the context of disability rights, a specifc focus is placed on other marginalized groups who need more immediate consideration when they also have a form of disability. Most commonly, children (or youth) and women (and girls) with disabilities are discussed—often in combination—in the global disability discourse as groups prone to multiple marginalization. First of all, women with disabilities (Article 6) and children with disabilities (Article 7) are addressed with specifc articles in the Convention. Moreover, a closer look at the thematic setup of the COSPs to the CRPD shows that the specifc consideration of children and youth (main theme 2012, sub-themes 2014 and 2015) as well as women and girls (main theme 2012, sub-themes 2015 and 2018) is important in discussions about the implementation of the Convention. Also, the General Comment No. 3 by the CPRD Committee pays particular attention to women and children, stating that they "face barriers in most areas of life" (United Nations 2016a, 1). According to the UN, the main dangers for women and children with disabilities are poverty, lack of health care, the general degree of social inclusion and participation, and lack of employment and equal education (United Nations 2014; United Nations 2016a). However, it must also be noted that children and women with disabilities in the Global North face different challenges to those in the Global South and that the focus of politicians and advocates can differ in light of this. Being at the intersection of several forms of marginalization and discrimination, the topic of children and women with disabilities is dealt with in close cooperation between the respective units of the CRPD, the CRC and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Watson 2012; Kayess et al. 2014; see also Holzscheiter in this volume).

One of the most controversially discussed topics during the meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee to the CRPD was that of education (Biermann and Powell 2014; de Beco 2018). The main argument involved the position on whether the Convention text should exclusively demand inclusive education or whether schooling in separated special schools or classes should still be maintained as an option. Although member states are asked in the fnal version in Article 24 to "ensure an inclusive education system at all levels" (United Nations 2006, 16), the schooling of persons with disabilities still differs widely across the world. The CRPD Committee has emphasized the importance of education as a disability rights issue by publishing the General Comment No. 4 on inclusive education (United Nations 2016b). At the same time, WHO's ICF is still used to justify special education systems. From a medicalized perspective, the classifcation can be useful for the allocation of resources (Schiemer 2017). As is the case for children and women with disabilities, education for persons with disabilities on a broader, more global level also needs to address different issues depending on the region. In countries of the Global North such as Germany, the main argument is between supporters of a traditional segregation system with special schools and proponents of a comprehensive, inclusive system. In contrast, countries in the Global South (e.g., Nigeria) are still struggling to provide any sort of education for disabled children (Biermann 2016). Hence, DPOs emphasize the importance of assuring general access of persons with disabilities to the education system, frst and foremost, though they also support the inclusive approach.

In an increasingly digitalized world, another crucial topic for disability policy is technology. As different scholars point out, the provision of assistive and accessible technology is mandatory for the inclusion of people with disabilities in policymaking processes. For instance, Trevisan and Cogburn (2019) emphasize that offcial UN conferences lack accessibility and thereby exclude disability rights advocates from participation. Only the COSPs to the CRPD meet the needs of disabled persons, making it diffcult to represent persons with disabilities in events that do not explicitly address disability policy. Moreover, Alper and Raharinirina (2006) have shown through their systematic review that assistive technologies for individuals are also still rare. This topic is also taken into account by different IOs in the context of disability policy. Just recently, "technology, digitalization and ICTs for the empowerment and inclusion of persons with disabilities" was announced as a sub-theme for the CRPD COSP 2019, making technology a sub-theme at the conference for the third time (after 2012 and 2016). A UN specialized agency that directly addresses the intersection of ICTs and disability—and that appeared prominently in the CRPD Twitter network—is the ITU. In order to meet the needs of persons with disabilities in using ICTs, as is required by Article 9 of the CRPD, the ITU provides policymakers with reports and guidelines as well as trainings and capacity-building programs. This material is published to enable member states of the ITU to make their ICTs accessible. Discussing accessible and assistive technology in the context of global disability policy is particularly interesting as it represents the part of the feld that is most proftable for private business actors. Hence, new partnerships between public (inter-)governmental actors, civil society and businesses are already forming at the global level and can infuence future disability policymaking (Goggin and Newell 2007; Stienstra et al. 2007).

#### Conclusion

The main objective of this chapter was to examine disability as a 'new' global social policy theme. Both the development of global disability policy and the involvement of different IOs in that organizational feld were examined. In order to approach a mapping of the global disability policy network and to identify particularly central actors as well as their interactions, social network analysis was used to map the Twitter network surrounding the UN CRPD. Finally, the main discourses of the feld were identifed.

The development of disability policy, both at national and global levels, was mainly infuenced by a shift from the general conceptualization of disability as a negative condition of individuals that needed to be reacted to with care and welfare in order to assimilate them to the social norm (the medical model), toward a perception of disability as barriers and limitations imposed by society that disabled persons have to face (the social model). The two main IOs in the feld—the UN agencies assigned to the CRPD on the one hand and WHO on the other—stand divided by this discourse. While the UN tends to promote the right of persons with disabilities to a society and environment without barriers, WHO tends to maintain the medicalization of disability. However, since the adoption of the CRPD, the UN has undoubtedly been the dominant actor, driven by its monitoring system that obliges its member states to regularly disclose their disability policy. As Búrca, Keohane, and Sabel (2013) note, this rather new mode of governance can best be described as 'experimentalist governance' (see also Sabel and Zeitlin 2010). Experimentalist governance is characterized by "a set of practices involving open participation by a variety of entities (public or private), lack of formal hierarchy within governance arrangements, and extensive deliberation throughout the process of decision making and implementation" (de Búrca et al. 2013, 16). In an iterative process, it is left to the member states of an international treaty to establish ways of incorporating the goals of the treaty into their domestic policy framework and, in return, their performance is regularly assessed by IO bodies. This iterative process can create a dynamic of peer pressure that often leads to a continuous strengthening of policy targets accompanied by a gradually evolving institutionalization and formalization of the procedural rules.

This structure offers diverse opportunities for IOs to engage in global disability policy. However, as the Convention is still rather new, there is currently not much research on the involvement and especially the interplay of different actors, such as the UN and WHO. To date, only the important role played by civil society organizations and their robust relationship with the UN bodies have been emphasized by different authors (Lord and Stein 2008; Degener and Begg 2017; de Búrca et al. 2013). Our empirical mapping of the CRPD Twitter network also suggests that the CRPD-related accounts are well connected to other UN agencies and to crucial civil society actors, while WHO is rather excluded from these discursive networking activities (see also Schuster et al. 2019). It will be interesting to see how the organizational feld around global disability policy will develop in the future and what role WHO will play. Moreover, the increasing focus on persons with disabilities as 'human capital'—with the OECD as a driving force behind an economic model—has the potential to steer global disability policies toward the creation of workfare states. In theory, this is in line with the social model and the focus on the right to inclusion. Consequently, critics of the social model state that a mere focus on the social barriers neglects the bodily impairments, and that this in turn can deny the necessity of medicalization (Thomas 2004). Hence, scholars have recently made attempts to synthesize the medical and the social model in order to take into account "the complete background of an individual's life and living", including environmental and personal factors (Barnes 2011, 66). Adding the economic model, future disability policy both at global and national levels—will have to be made within this area of tension between the different conceptualizations, thereby leaving space for IOs to exert their infuence.

#### References

Abbott, Kenneth W., Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane. 2016. "Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance." *International Organization* 70 (2): 247–277. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0020818315000338.


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# Health and Environment

# Characterizing Global Health Governance by International Organizations: Is There an Ante- and Post-COVID-19 Architecture?

# *Alexandra Kaasch*

#### Introduction

Health is commonly considered as one of the most fundamental, but also highly challenging needs in individual and societal life. As a policy feld, it extends and connects to an incredibly broad and complex set of issues such as different notions of well-being, different types of illnesses (e.g. infectious and non-infectious), different groups of people, the various functions and elements of public and private health care systems and diverse service providers. Part of these issues extend beyond national spheres of social problems or policymaking—most clearly communicable diseases do not stop at national borders. Furthermore, migration leads to national systems of social and health protection being confronted with constantly new categories of people as well as new health challenges; health care professionals, pharmaceutical companies and other providers

A. Kaasch (\*)

Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: alexandra.kaasch@uni-bielefeld.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 233

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_10

have long crossed national borders in their provision of health care, medical goods and insurance plans.

This has led to some conceptual tension, as health care systems (here understood as institutions of social protection responsible for the provision and fnancing of health care) are established and organized as distinctly national (or sub-national) institutions. Nevertheless, at transnational policy levels there is signifcant activity on various health care systemrelated issues which entails the emergence and involvement of a high number of global policy actors. Better yet, there is a clear trend toward an increasing number of global actors, as for example Youde (2015, 130) puts it "the global health governance architecture has become far more encompassing and wide-ranging in recent years".

The focus of this chapter is on global actors (*population*) of and ideas (*arguments*) on health care systems, for the purpose of producing a characterization of the current global health governance architecture in the feld. This frst requires an illustration of global health governance in general so as to understand its specifc actor set. The positions and constellation of key International Organizations (IOs) are then illustrated by a mapping of four central IOs: the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The main ideas of these four IOs regarding health care systems are presented in relation to each other and by taking into account their discourses. This is then taken further to characterize the global health governance architecture based on contestational and collaborative relationships between these IOs. While fnalizing this chapter, the world has come under threat from a massive global health crisis. Thus, in an additional paragraph, this chapter also discusses the preliminary implications of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for altering that architecture. The concluding section refects upon the implications of the ante- and emerging post-COVID-19 situation for global social governance in the feld of health care systems.

# Global Health Governance

The population of IOs in the feld of health is subject to a very large body of literature under the frame of global health governance. For the purpose of this book on global *social* governance, I combine such approaches with those of the global social policy and governance literature.

Global social governance has generally been defned as being comprised of a huge number of different actors. Often, the relationship between these actors has been characterized by competing organizations, some of which claim to be the key and central actors in the game (particularly, Deacon 2007; Kaasch and Martens 2015; Kaasch and Stubbs 2014; Yeates 2008). Apart from other activities, these actors provide social policy prescriptions for different social policy felds, including for health care systems (Kaasch 2015). This involves various activities such as the collection, presentation and interpretation of relevant data, the development of concepts and the prescription of 'appropriate' social policy measures and instruments to meet social problems. IOs present these 'products' as information, recommendations, ideal models, reform suggestions and the like. In the academic literature, these activities by IOs and their outputs have been conceptualized and studied as ideas, discourses or knowledge production (see, e.g. Béland and Orenstein 2013; Stone and Maxwell 2005).

Concerning the population of IOs, global health governance literature draws a picture of a plurality of different sorts of actors. These include public and private actors, collective and individual ones, as well as various sorts of actor networks. Given their nature—that of being set up by governments, granted with mandates and tasks, and intensely observed and covered by worldwide political and media actors—IOs have a very important position and role.

In explaining the emergence of global policies in the feld of health, some characterizations portray global health governance as a response to global health challenges, an expression of international cooperation, and as such a necessity, given current global (health) problems. Part of the argument is that the nature of global health problems and the limitations of national health care systems lead to global health governance (e.g. Fidler 2010; Smith and Lee 2017). Even though the transnational character of these problems may be more than obvious to the researcher, the political reality is that there is no consequential referral of competency to transnational policy levels. As we can see with reactions to the global threat of COVID-19, the measures and responses are strongly national. Therefore, the political and legal realities contradict explanations of the nature of the problem shaping or causing global social and health governance architectures: policymaking competence in the health care system is at national policy levels with very few and minor exceptions.

Another part of the literature characterizes global health governance more qualitatively and often combines this with normative claims on the desired nature of global health governance. This does not contradict other assessments which describe global health governance as the concerted efforts to privatize health services and global health activities, accompanied by "indirect efforts by the same actors that present bona fde social justice and equity-oriented public health approaches" (Birn et al. 2016, 753). For sure, health markets are an important part of the global economy in many ways, and the 'concern' for public health is also strongly shared at a global level, which is refected in the globally constituted communities raising their voices in the name of social justice in health. The notion of 'the global' informing this chapter, however, is the interest and concern of global actors as regards issues of (national) health care systems. This approach does not assume a legal competence in regulating health care systems from transnational policy levels; neither does it assume a relevance of global actors in terms of the nature of contemporary health issues. What it does is observe and study global actors with a (direct or indirect) mandate to 'speak' on health care systems. This implies an analysis of mandates, ideas and inter-actor relationships (for more detail on this approach, see Kaasch 2015; Kaasch and Martens 2015).

For the purpose of this book, this chapter focuses on only one type of actor, namely IOs. IOs have been founded with broad and general aims, usually directed at either a policy feld or a group of (vulnerable) people. As part of such mandates, they intervene within, but also beyond specifc policy felds and react to changing conditions as well as varying and emerging problems and crises. Furthermore, they do not conduct their work in isolation from each other. Inter-actor relationships are dynamic, susceptible to shifts, and are part of what causes changing settings in global health governance (Kaasch and Martens 2015; Fidler 2010; Cooper and Farooq 2015). Furthermore, as Ng and Prah Ruger (2011, 17) argue, such relationships are often characterized by "insuffcient coordination, the pursuit of national and organizational self-interest, inadequate participation by the recipients and targets of aid, and sheer lack of resources". There is also another "concept" used to refer to global health governance: chaotic pluralism (Van Belle et al. 2018, 1). This is where the individual global health actors, including IOs, often appear in a contradictory light and are portrayed as not living up to their responsibilities for various reasons. The contradictory image in the approach used for this chapter, however, is focusing on the secretariats or headquarters of IOs and their ideas on health care systems only. While the concrete ideas developed and communicated may refect national perspectives or experiences, these are usually not systematically interest-driven as to any IO staff member's national background (another issue would be analyses driven by providers of extrabudgetary funding, but the level of analysis and type of documents studied is assumed to be at a level where this is not a strong factor).

The meaning of IOs in the context of this chapter is, therefore, focused on what they express and recommend (*arguments*) with regard to the specifc issue of health care systems. On the one hand, such ideas are being shaped by organizational mandates generating some sort of path dependence. On the other hand, they are also being adjusted and they change in reaction to a number of contextual and historical factors. Ideas might change as concepts of a social or health problem become broader or more diversifed; there might be new actor alliances that let shared terminologies and concepts emerge; better or altered problem descriptions might generate a need for new or adjusted solutions; or there might be strategic reasons (such as more and competing actors in the feld) that might lead to new or different approaches by a single IO. In that sense, the population in terms of number and inter-actor relationships of global actors in the feld of health care systems has an important impact on the architecture of arguments.

#### Mapping IOs in Global Health Governance

Global health governance is characterized by a multiplicity of actors. These actors may be very different in their composition, size, mechanisms or power. Most visible are international organizations (WHO and the World Bank in particular), philanthropic organizations (particularly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), hybrid organizations (particularly the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria) and non-governmental organizations (most well-known are perhaps the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE)).

Looking at IOs more specifcally, the answer as to which organizations matter and how many populate the feld critically depends on the specifc health feld or issue looked at. Focusing on health care systems, WHO is in the center considering its mandate and role within the United Nations (UN) system. The World Bank is critical, given its power to provide funding for research and projects on health care systems. However, there is more than that: on the one hand, there are other IOs focused on specifc health issues such as the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). On the other hand—and this will be the focus of this chapter there are other more generally social policy-related IOs that include health care systems as an important component in social protection in their work. These are the ILO and the OECD (see also Kaasch 2015).

In the following sections I describe the roles of WHO, the World Bank, the ILO and the OECD in matters of health care systems in more detail, as well as how they collaborate, compete or—more generally—relate to each other.

#### *World Health Organization: Key Mandate, Encompassing Ideas but Multiply Contested Position*

In terms of its mandate and position within the UN system, WHO is the frst and central IO to look at when it comes to global health policies. It is the UN's health agency and by mandate concerned with all kinds of health policies at various levels. This certainly holds true for medical information and where health care systems (as institutions of social protection) are concerned, though neither its mandate nor its actual role are straightforward or uncontested.

More specifcally, WHO's constitution provides the IO with both a norm-setting and coordinative function in the feld of health care systems. In terms of 'policy content' or ideas, the general aim is the "attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health", stipulated in the WHO constitution, which has been specifed into a mandate to assist governments in strengthening their health services (Constitution of WHO, article 2c; see WHO (2020a)). Nevertheless, due to WHO's multi-faceted mandate, the resulting role and position have been changing over time because of fnancial and organizational constraints as well as a changing global architecture. Over the decades, WHO has defned itself as the "health conscience" (World Health Assembly (WHA) 1973) in the 1970s, the "health advocate" (WHO 1998) in the 1990s and the "directing and coordinating authority in international health works" (WHO 2006) in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, there is a tendency to supply broad descriptions of a set of WHO roles. Furthermore, the fact that WHO is not alone and uncontested in the feld, but part of a broader global governance scenarios is much more refected: "WHO is joint lead agency with the ILO in the United Nations initiative to help countries develop a comprehensive Social Protection Floor" (WHO 2010). In its latest (13th) General Program of Work, WHO shows itself as an actor providing public goods, a science- and evidence-based organization setting global norms and standards, an advocate for health as a human right, an organization networking "to build a community to work for the shared future of humankind" (WHO 2019, 3) and an institution to monitor global health developments. It is also active in developing plans together with national governments for better health care systems and for the realization of universal health coverage (UHC). Beyond that, at the global (horizontal) level, WHO assumes a role in "raising global awareness of UHC" (WHO 2019, 19; see also Cook et al. 2020).

Operationalizing its health care system mandate, WHO structures its strategic priorities around three main areas, namely universal health coverage, health emergencies and health promotion (WHO 2019). More specifcally, the concepts under which health care systems have been dealt with have seen a certain dynamic and changes over time, even though most of them did not fully replace each other and have also seen times of 'revival'. Among them are primary health care and health for all (in the 1970s), health care systems strengthening, social determinants of health, UHC and social health protection (as part of the social protection foor initiative and collaboration in the 2010s). Furthermore, the Sustainable Development Goals (and to a lesser extent the prior Millennium Development Goals) have provided a framework within which health care systems have been approached.

Currently, WHO mostly defnes its ideas and strategies on health care systems specifcally in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in connection to the aim of achieving UHC. This is also combined with the social protection foor framework and initiative that increasingly turned into a UN initiative, including meetings on a regular basis, and which was particularly driven by WHO jointly with the ILO and the World Bank. The core idea being that essential health care should be one of four basic social security guarantees.

In sum, the arguments brought in by WHO have importantly—even if under different headings and buzzwords—centered around what is now called UHC. It stands for the aim of universal access to primary health care, to fnancial risk protection, to people-centered health care systems and to comprehensiveness in service provision and access. This ideational account can be regarded as a somewhat cohesive and coherent approach, promoted with the justifcation of a normative and coordinative mandate of the IO. WHO's position as a global actor more generally, but also the quality of its health care system assessments and recommendations, has been questioned and criticized frequently, however, which limits the IO's power to live up to its tasks (e.g. Youde 2018; Kaasch 2015). The following sections will show how and by whom WHO got challenged in the position of the lead agency in global health governance in the feld of health care systems.

#### *World Bank: Derived Mandate, Changing Ideas and Multiple Powerful Positions*

The World Bank has been founded with a completely different idea from WHO. It is a fnancial institution with funding means, more independent but also linked to the UN system, and it does not have a health mandate in the frst place. However, over the years, it has increasingly considered the health sector as a feld to engage with in aiming to fght poverty (which is part of its mandate according to the Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)). Thus, the World Bank has also evolved into a massive knowledge actor in the feld of health care systems.

The World Bank's engagement in health developed from the 1980s onward in particular. That meant, on the one hand, that the IO increased its interest and activities in the health sector. But, on the other hand, it also led to a more encompassing and thorough understanding and concept of what the meaning and content of health care systems is. Over time, this brought the World Bank away from earlier and pretty much standard economic arguments thrown on the health sector (which were often not really appropriate either, such as the promotion of user fees, or most basic health care) to much more elaborate and comprehensive concepts of health care systems which appreciate the functions of UHC and their meaning as systems of social protection necessary for developmental success. Still, the main focus is on those health care system-related issues and needs that are particularly critical for low- and middle-income countries, as those are the World Bank's main 'clients'.

Apart from developing a health mandate out of poverty reduction, the World Bank has continuously justifed its role in the feld through specifc strategies for the health sector that have become increasingly comprehensive and specifc in terms of its understanding of and role in health care systems. Through these strategies, the World Bank manifests a very broad and very competent role in engaging with national health policymakers, the implementation of projects, and facilitating knowledge exchange. It uses the illustration of comparative advantages to justify its role, such as expertise in health fnancing, governance, accountability in health service delivery and the like.

Despite a certain degree of contradiction between WHO and World Bank approaches and their claims on necessary action in health care systems, recent years have been remarkably characterized by collaboration between the two (and other) IOs, particularly in the area of UHC and social protection foors. Therefore, the 'struggle on positions' (Deacon 2007; Kaasch 2015) has been sidelined by more or less strategic collaboration and increasingly shared frameworks of reference. UHC is now the key concept used to explain and develop the World Bank's health strategy, as it is said to respond to the World Bank's twin goals (ending extreme poverty and increasing equality and shared prosperity) and is linked to the Sustainable Development Goals as well as other collaborative global health initiatives.

Nevertheless, what provides the World Bank with a clear comparative advantage is the number of staff they have, and that they possess the means to run different sorts of activities and projects related to health care systems. Within its headquarters, there are many health system experts, particularly in its Human Development Network Section on Health, Nutrition and Population, but also in its social protection unit and other units that have an overlap with health care system-related issues. In this way, the World Bank has developed into a key source for policy evidence and policy advice in this social policy feld.

In terms of health care systems support (in the positive sense) or the impact on national health care systems (in a critical sense), the World Bank is certainly much more powerful than WHO, particularly when it concerns low- and middle-income countries, and to some extent also when calling for actions in and through health care systems in crisis response situations. Regarding the shaping of key ideas or arguments, however, WHO's concepts have proven more appealing and are now also refected in many World Bank utterances and guide many World Bank initiatives.

#### *International Labor Organization: Questioned Mandate, Coherent Ideas and Limited Position*

Founded a hundred years ago, the ILO is the UN agency mandated with the promotion of social justice and human and labor rights. As a tripartite organization, it shows quite a different structure compared to WHO and other IOs within the UN system, but in its secretariat (the International Labour Offce), a number of staff also work on health care systems as part of the ILO's social protection framework. In terms of justifying its mandate, the ILO's engagement in social protection and health is, similarly to the World Bank, related to fghting poverty, addressing income security and as such improving access to health services.

However, the ILO's initial concerns were predominantly on the specifc needs of *workers* and that has also informed their initial take on health care issues. That has played out in a twofold way: health issues connected to the workplace and health as dimension of social security related to the lives of workers. Accordingly, and as we can see in the World Labor Report 2000 (International Labour Offce 2000), there are adverse effects of health problems on earning capacity, and there is fnancial risk connected to the inability to work due to health problems. In the meantime (and also in a broader than health care system sense), however, the ILO has adjusted its take on these issues in recognition of the fact that many people work in the informal sector. For example, Scheil-Adlung made this explicit by explaining that "to be meaningful, legal health coverage needs to result in effective access for all residents of a country" (Scheil-Adlung 2014, 6).

This broader perspective on residents, rather than workers, had important implications for how the ILO could position itself as a general global health actor, at least as far as health means social health protection, and in doing so it can be seen as giving voice to health care systems as well. Nowadays, the ILO even relates to the UHC aim and related agendas: it has diagnosed that insuffcient funding is the main problem for providing essential health care, which then increases the risk of fnancial hardship (ILO 2019, vii).

The potential power of the ILO is different to both WHO and the World Bank in the sense that the ILO possesses a function in facilitating international law as a result of its tripartite assembly, which includes the Secretariat (Deacon 2013). Beyond that, the ILO has had a strong role in coordinating (partly with WHO and the World Bank) the Social Protection Floor initiative. In terms of providing specifc ideas, what can be found is only derived from a very small number of staff members able to engage the issue (Kaasch 2015, 67).

Overall, even if the ILO is not considered in most of the global health literature, an account of global social governance in the feld of health care systems must not leave this organization out of the picture. It is the organization providing the frame through which to view health (care systems) as an element of social protection. In this way, the ILO contributes a logic different to the more medical or technical perspectives, but also to perspectives of the most basic provision of health care necessary to lift people out of poverty. Instead, it leans toward being an integral part of a system making societies more equal and improving health in a socially sustainable way. Nevertheless, its potential of positioning itself as a strong global actor in the feld of health care systems is limited, and does not go much beyond one feld within its coherent concept of social protection.

#### *Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Derived Mandate, Expanding Idea and Growing Position*

Much like the ILO, the OECD is not typically considered to be a global health actor in its own right (particularly not in global health governance literature). However, global social policy and governance literature have increasingly focused on this IO (e.g. Mahon 2019; Deeming and Smyth 2019). In the past few years, there has been a signifcant expansion in the OECD's health work, so that my own account from 2015 describing the OECD's involvement in health policies as only just evolving and dependent on "an explicit demand from its member states for specifc activities and engagement in health policies" (Kaasch 2015) now appears to be somewhat outdated.

Originally, the OECD's health work grew out of its statistical work in the second half of the 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, health has been dealt with as part of the social policy work of the OECD, but still mostly in terms of statistical work. Then, with the 2000s, the OECD's work became more analytical, also in a qualitative sense, particularly in the context of the OECD Health Project (2001–2004). Over the past decades, the OECD's role in health seems to have become the most integral part of its engagement, and no longer accompanied by much of an explicit legitimizing reasoning.

This is the case even in a twofold sense: for its own member states, the OECD has taken on an important role in assessing and comparing their health care systems. In this way, it challenges the competence of WHO in the feld of health care systems. What started with a small number of very careful, country-specifc health care system assessments on demand (Kaasch 2010) has developed into an encompassing role in supporting OECD member states understanding and enhancing their health care systems to become more people-centered. This has provided the basis for the development of new assessment methods, tools and guidance by this IO on health care systems. At the same time, the OECD is increasingly part of the global health (development) community, engaging in development agendas in the feld of health, including the attainment of the SDGs and realizing the UHC agenda (OECD 2017b).

In the past, OECD health work was clearly characterized by dealing with health, on the one hand, as a social service and, on the other hand, as an economic factor. These perspectives have got increasingly balanced over time. Health care systems, according to OECD work, should provide accessible health care (for all citizens), respect equality and equity, provide high-quality health care, be mindful of economic effciency, and also provide for redistribution and income protection (e.g. OECD 2004). Similarly to the other IOs discussed here, the OECD now fully subscribes to the UHC agenda, justifying that by stating that its work could show that "UHC contributes to promoting more inclusive growth; improves health outcomes; and is affordable" (OECD 2017a).

The OECD fulflls its health mandate by providing its highly acknowledged data and expertise, while at the same time joining in collaborative endeavors with WHO, the ILO, the World Bank and others. This mix of approaches makes it an increasingly powerful global voice on health care systems and provides the OECD with a position as a legitimate and credible actor in the feld.

# Characterizing Global Health Governance by Its Architecture or Arguments

Looking at the feld of health care systems in terms of global social governance, we can identify several decades of discourse with an increasing number of major IOs engaging. While it is possible to follow certain traditions and the development and change of concepts, we particularly see the relationships and formation of global actors, specifcally IOs, in processes of alteration. Therefore, the architecture of global social policy in this feld is now signifcantly different from those of the past decades. The centrality of WHO might still be the same (both in terms of its key mandate and in terms of how and why it is challenged and questioned), however, the increasing number of IOs in the feld, each coming with specifc characteristics and resources of power, has challenged this position on a repetitive and increasingly complex basis. At the same time, regarding the content of ideas and character of discourses, we see an increasingly shared, but also broad set of concepts, principles and aims for health care systems among many of those actors. This is in some contrast to characterizations up until the early 2000s when the emphasis was more on different epistemic communities and practices in health care systems.

More concretely, if we trace back the global health history of the past by at least 50 years or so, the Alma-Ata Declaration of the 1970s may be seen as a starting point and point of reference for emerging global health ideas and discourses—though merely for WHO and associated global actors. An important tension of the time was the different interpretations of key concepts between WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the latter leaning more toward the World Bank's basic safety net ideas of the time (see, e.g. Koivusalo and Ollila 1997). These frameworks, namely 'primary health care' (PHC) and 'health care for all' (HFA), were introduced at that time and have guided WHO work ever since. In the 1990s, global ideas and discourses on health care systems were increasingly also developed by and within the World Bank. These ideas were connected to its engagement both in the transformation states in Central and Eastern Europe (Kaasch 2015) and in emerging economies such as Indonesia sidelining their economic development with expanding health care systems.

The ILO, in the meantime, has developed a somewhat independent but minor account of health care systems as part of their social protection work. It has, however, gained increasing importance in the context of increasingly collaborative activities in the 2000s (the social protection foor initiative). At the same time, and partly due to shortcomings of WHO, the OECD continuously expanded its health work in terms of ideas and engagement in the feld.

It was partly in the context of the reaction to the global economic and fnancial crises that the IOs discussed in this chapter also provided prescriptions for how to address the crisis through social policy measures. These contributions came rather quickly from 2008 onward and particularly warned not to repeat any cutbacks in health and other social services as had happened in the 1990s in many crisis-affected countries. Given the nature of that crisis though, the initial focus was much more on 'jobs' than on other systems of social protection. Both WHO and the OECD, however, recommended counter-cyclical public spending and stressed the role of health care systems as well as their function as automatic stabilizers (Kaasch 2014).

In sum, the inter-IO discourse has considerably changed through the developments described in the previous sections, and so has the architecture of governance in the feld: previously distinct agendas and activities are increasingly shared and merged, even though to some extent different 'languages' are being used, strongly oppositional epistemic communities cannot be identifed. The UHC agenda and the Social Protection Inter-Agency Collaboration Board (SPIAC-B) are the current settings within which all IOs discussed locate their ideational accounts. Accordingly, global social governance as the architecture of arguments on health care systems can be summarized as having developed into increasingly broad concepts and shared principles among the key IOs working in the feld.

## Global Health Governance in the COVID-19 Context

While fnalizing this chapter, the COVID-19 outbreak has not only paralyzed national and global societies and generated massive political reactions and measures, but even IOs in the feld of health have been on demand and have had to adjust their activities to this new, dramatic situation. In this section, I illustrate their 'reactions' (in terms of their comments on health care systems in the COVID-19 context) and discuss the question of whether or not there is an ante- and post-Corona architecture emerging in global social governance in the feld of health care systems.

Unsurprisingly and in continuity with what has been illustrated in this chapter, WHO appeared as the central, frst, and most signifcant actor from the very beginning—although this was more in terms of its role as the health agency responsible for alerting everyone to the fact that a pandemic disease was spreading, as well as its work on the medical side of things. In terms of its mandate on health care systems, WHO delivered by providing some ideas and guidelines as well. These have been linked to its common framework on health care systems (strengthening) and UHC, the critical points being well-fnanced health care systems following the principles of risk-sharing and UHC. The concept referred to and used here is 'public fnancial management'. In a related document, Barroy et al. (2020) clarify that the COVID-19 response requires suffcient public funding and recommend a turn away from private toward public funding modes. Funding, so the authors claim, needs to be made available and stocked up; furthermore, there is the need for balance between fexibility and accountability. Kutzin (2020) further argues that countries do not need to make a choice between health security and UHC, but rather that the two are dependent on each other. Accordingly, "investing in core health care system-functions is key to both, completed by public policy actions beyond the health care system". In more concrete, technical guiding notes though, WHO's focus appears to be slightly different. Rather than drawing on the broader social protection network, WHO appears to be collaborating with UNICEF, specifcally on ideas regarding health care systems and COVID-19. This also implies placing focus back on Primary Health Care (PHC) and the community level, albeit considered within national multilevel systems. The focus is on select essential services and prevention (WHO and UNICEF 2020). In another document, WHO highlights how, as a consequence of high numbers of COVID-19 cases, the need to limit and consciously direct resources may arise. This is in some inexplicit contrast to more comprehensive social protection recommendations on health care systems; here, WHO is more situated in the older tradition and turns to postponing and suspending routine and elective services, to targeted immediate action, and at reorganization measures (for the recommendations see, e.g. WHO 2020b).

In terms of the World Bank, thus far it has not published a comprehensive piece on COVID-19 and health care systems in particular, but instead on social protection more generally in relation to the SPIAC-B (Social Protection Interagency Cooperation Board) (2020). However, it has fnancially supported a number of countries in strengthening their health care systems in the current situation and issued a factsheet on that. According to that factsheet, about \$160 billion will be provided for assisting countries (World Bank 2020). In some contrast to the above, however, the International Finance Cooperation (part of the World Bank Group) is a strong component in this support, as there is belief in the private sector being critical to mastering and overcoming the crisis.

At the same time, some more concrete recommendations come from frst short publications on related issues, namely a brief that highlights the necessity of infection prevention as well as control policies and campaigns to draw attention to necessary hygiene measures (Bedoya and Dolinger 2020); and Gillson and Muramatsu (2020) who recommend allowing cross-border movement of health personnel and goods, and exploration of tele-medicine. Thus, overall, more comprehensive and focused health care system ideas have not yet been established and distributed. That is certainly more due to the complexity of the matter, as well as the urgency and depth of the COVID-19 crisis, than to dismissal of the World Bank from the critical role of health care systems in responding to global pandemic disease outbreaks.

The ILO's COVID-19 contributions thus far reveal its typical focus on the world of work, in that it re-emphasizes the need for social protection systems—including foors—to prevent and meet crisis situations, and stresses that emergency crisis responses should ideally be executed with a longer-term perspective in mind. This would include guaranteed access to good health care by means of additional public funds (both for emergency response, safeguarding and extending coverage) (ILO 2020c). Furthermore, and more specifcally related to its social protection mandate, the ILO has focused on the meaning and role of sickness benefts as part of social health protection systems. This is not particularly an issue of the health care system, but the question of income security in the case of illness for the prevention of impoverishment (ILO 2020b). There are more specifc ideas on entitlements to social sickness protection for this specifc COVID-19 outbreak situation. The ILO paper argues that there is a risk of further disease spread if unprotected people continue working while contagious, and that there is a high risk of impoverishment if they are not covered by health insurance. This results in recommendations to extend coverage to all by mobilizing additional fnancial resources, expanding the scope of sickness benefts (e.g. in cases of quarantine or care obligations), increasing beneft levels and removing any waiting periods or other constraints to speedy delivery of sickness benefts (ILO 2020a).

As for the OECD, their work does address health care systems quite specifcally, though with a common and typical focus on collecting and analyzing data as well as illustrating the variations in the frst place. Their work shows how there are four key measures to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic from the side of health care systems: ensuring access, improving health care system capacity to manage caseload increases, digital solutions and data for care and surveillance, as well as improving research and development for improved diagnostics, treatments and vaccines (OECD 2020). In this case, however, the OECD report also draws rather clear conclusions and recommendations from the data:

The current crisis demonstrates the importance of universal health coverage as a key element for the resilience of health care systems. High levels of out-of-pocket payments may deter people from seeking early diagnosis and treatment, and thus contribute to acceleration in the rate of transmission. However, even in health care systems that have already achieved universal coverage, an epidemic caused by newly discovered pathogens requires an early response to clarify coverage for new diagnostic tests and treatments that were not previously included in the health beneft package. (OECD 2020, 6)

In a forum contribution, Francesca Colombo, Head of the OECD Health Division, additionally highlights the need for health care systems to be adaptable to health crises like this COVID-19 outbreak (Colombo 2020).

Thus, these accounts provide some picture of 'back to the roots' in global health governance as a COVID-19 response. At the point of writing this chapter, each of the organizations is re-focused on original mandates and defning foci of attention within that, rather than on all speaking on the same matter. Nevertheless, joint and collaborative work has also been happening, despite little of it being prominently placed on websites or elsewhere, and this does provide some evidence of continuity at the same time. In terms of the content of policy advice, it is somewhere between scaling up for meeting new health needs and focusing specifcally on COVID-19 at the expense of some non-urgent health services.

#### Conclusion

This chapter aimed at characterizing global social governance in the feld of health care systems. It focused on IOs and illustrated their key ideas, as well as their relationships with each other. Given the specifc timing of writing this chapter, the more general account of global health governance has since extended beyond, and to some extent contrasted with, the frst moves related to the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.

The important characteristics of global health governance as dealt with in this chapter are not to do with the global nature of social or health issues as such. Instead, the interest has been in global activities and on the subject of national competencies: the ideas of health care systems. IOs have been studied as knowledge and norm providers, not as potential regulators with legal power. So, what do these characterizations mean for the architecture of global social governance in the feld of health? Due to the high number of actors, the complexities of their relationships and a frustrating degree of failing multilateralism and global solidarity when it concerns addressing global health issues, some would claim "there is 'no architecture of global health'" (Garrett 2007, 246). Others would put the World Bank and WHO in the center and others loosely around, or in concentric circles of actors (Ng and Prah Ruger 2011, 2–3). The picture gets clearer though when more carefully defning the specifc meaning and focus of a health issue (though in the case of this chapter, it's still a very broad one).

The population of IOs in this feld has been characterized as multiactored, even when it concerns the selection of the most important global actors. The presentation and discussion of WHO, the World Bank, the ILO and the OECD have revealed that the ongoing relationships have been increasingly marked by collaboration. However, the architecture of arguments is also shaped by a certain duplication of work, which demands a constant effort to justify such a role (with reference to, but also clearly beyond, original mandates) (see also, Kaasch 2015). While in the 1970s–1990s the relationships were characterized more by competition and only short spots of collaboration on a non-stable basis, from the 2000s onward it has become much more common to join forces under specifc global initiatives (particularly the UHC agenda and the social protection foor initiative). Global crises have also marked interruptions in the activities of IOs, but while following the global economic and fnancial crisis we saw a quick and rather concerted reaction, whereas the 'initial reactions' to the current COVID-19 crisis hint at more IO-mandate oriented, individual approaches on ideas regarding health care systems.

#### References


Mahon, Rianne. 2019. "Broadening the Social Investment Agenda: The OECD, the World Bank and Inclusive Growth." *Global Social Policy* 19 (1–2): 121–138.


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# IOs and Climate Change: Toward Global Eco-Social Policy

#### *Silvana Lakeman*

#### Introduction

The introduction to this book stated that International Organizations (IOs) "provide forums for exchange, guide and supervise international treaties, which states sign and adhere to," as well as "direct, fnance and implement projects which affect people's lives" (see Niemann et al. in this volume). This is undoubtedly the case for the plethora of IOs engaging with climate change as a cross-cutting concern. Although climate change has perhaps only taken off as a clear global problem in the last 50 years (and social policy framings of the issue even later), it is evident that we now live in an age where "self-suffciency in social policy is no longer a realistic option" (George and Wilding 2002, 187).

Environmental changes and social policies are linked in several ways. On the one hand, climate change is a cause of social risk for individuals with specifc vulnerabilities (health, social and others), and for populations

S. Lakeman (\*)

Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science (BIGSSS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: lakeman@bigsss.uni-bremen.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 255

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_11

based in regions already affected by the more damaging consequences of climate change (such as rising sea levels or desertifcation). On the other hand, the typical measures and policies undertaken to tackle social and environmental problems are to a signifcant degree contradictory to one another; while social policy advancements are usually linked to economic development and growth, protecting the environment is better achieved by zero or even degrowth (Buch-Hansen and Koch 2019; Koch 2020). Furthermore, in the discussion of social policy and climate change, challenges converge in relation to social inequality and injustice. Questions abound regarding who is responsible for climate change and associated inequalities, especially as those countries and people causing the problem are typically the least affected. At the same time, global solidarity with respect to compensation for social problems related to climate change is of concern. This chapter discusses the role of international organizations in shaping global social policies in the feld of climate change, also known as eco-social policies more broadly, and studies IOs in their function as forums for exchange and potential facilitators of international treaties, as laid out in the introduction to this volume.

This chapter proceeds in three steps. It frst briefy highlights the temporal shift in discourse on climate change and the subsequent expansion of IOs engaging with the issue as a global social policy concern. For a long time, climate change was conceptualized in a narrow manner; however, in the twenty-frst century context it is understood as an underlying issue for global social policy writ large, especially as it relates to the global concept of sustainable development. As outlined in a second section, this has led to a wide variety of IOs from various policy felds engaging with climate change as a determinant of social well-being and as an issue to be addressed through social policies, with rapid historical developments in this area challenging the traditional roles and mandates of IOs. To illustrate this point, a third section explores the position of IOs in relation to climate insurance as a global social policy tool. This chapter argues that IOs occupy an important space as conveners and for exerting infuence—particularly 'soft' governance—when it comes to social policy dimensions of climate change, even if many IOs are not yet explicitly framing their work in such terms. A shift in global discourse on climate change—which has both given rise to the creation of IOs and been directly infuenced by IO behavior—is illustrative of this point.

#### Shifting Discourse and Expanding IO Engagement

In the feld of climate change, there are numerous IOs exerting soft governance, opening spaces for discussion, and dealing with the issue as a cross-cutting concern for social policy. Certain IOs have clearly demarcated authority on climate change, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the same time, a wider population of IOs with diverse mandates and functions—especially those in the United Nations (UN) family—now see climate change as an omnipresent threat, understanding it as an intersecting issue that needs to be addressed if original mandates are to be responsibly fulflled.

From a historical perspective, the global discourse on climate change has undergone considerable transformation, of which IOs have been part and parcel. In the post-World War II context, major IOs addressed environmental change under the auspices of environmental conservation or climate science. In 1948, the UN established the International Union for the Protection of Nature and Human Resources (now the International Union Conservation of Nature and Human Resources, or IUCN) for environmental conservation, and in 1951 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to focus on climatic change. However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a broader understanding of the global consequences of environmental degradation took hold in the international community, with climate change identifed as a clear problem arising from industrialization in the Global North (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005, 48–82). This conceptualization was central to the UN's frst global Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, which sparked the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (Brisman 2011, 1039–1040). Given the rhetoric at the time, UNEP was mandated to contribute toward the development and implementation of policies which strike a balance between economic development and overcoming environmental degradation (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005, 57–58).

Further developments and events in the 1970s cemented both the recognition of climate change as a global issue, and the importance of IOs as collaborators and conveners in this domain. These included WMO's frst international assessment of the state of the ozone layer in 1976, which was associated with growing global health concerns and triggered a range of studies over the following decades between WMO and UNEP (Social Learning Group 2001, 13), and the watershed World Climate Conference in 1979, which was a collaborative effort between WMO, the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), UNEP, the International Council for Science (ICSU), and other partners (Zillman 2009). The World Climate Conference resulted in WMO and UNEP together establishing the IPCC—now one of the most trusted sources for scientifc consensus on climate change. Subsequent watershed successes for global climate change policy, especially the Montreal Protocol, were at least in part due to the involvement of IOs in assisting and including developing countries in the discussion on the environment, especially via the Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which is managed by an Executive Committee comprising UNEP, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the World Bank (Luken and Grof 2006).

In the 1980s, seeds were sown for current IO discourse and partnership on climate change with a focus on sustainable development. In 1980, IUCN partnered with UNEP, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), FAO, and UNESCO (IUCN et al. 1980) to create the "World conservation strategy: living resource conservation for sustainable development." Although sustainability in that report focused more on the environment itself than (economic) development, by 1984, the UN General Assembly had established the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005, 59–60). Providing a new defnition for economic development with the environment at its core, the Brundtland Commission's 1987 report "Our Common Future" proposed a global development and environment strategy designed to be acceptable to all, popularizing the mainstream term 'sustainable development' as we know it today—development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987).

Following this report, multiple keystone conferences took place which have ultimately shaped current discourse on social policy and climate change. In 1990, a second World Climate Conference took place, and while its predecessor had led to the creation of the IPCC, the second presented the IPCC's frst assessment report, which highlighted the risks of global climate change (IPCC and Houghton 1990). This event, coupled with the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro (the Earth Summit), led to the establishment of the UNFCCC. The UNFCCC would go on to dominate global discourse and act as the primary convening body for states looking to address climate change (Kuyper et al. 2018), as well as to play a direct role in the exploration of how to address some of the social consequences of climate change via social policy. More importantly, the Earth Summit cemented the notion of sustainable development as a vector for social policy, combined with the promotion of environmental protection (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005, 64).

Discursive focus on sustainable development dominated at the turn of the twenty-frst century, as all UN Member States and a variety of associated IOs committed to eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) measured by targets in a variety of social issue areas. Although only the seventh goal explicitly relates to climate change ("to ensure environmental sustainability"), the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a whole are considered far more interdependent, bringing together socioeconomic, political, and environmental sectors (Nilsson et al. 2016). Climate change and social policies both belong to the objectives to be achieved through the collective action model of the SDGs, and following decades of incremental developments, IOs now view climate change as a social policy concern. IOs which may not have originally or directly addressed climate change now do so anyway, with a common set of terms comprising the new discourse on IO involvement in this area; this notably includes the identifcation of vulnerable groups in the context of climate change and enhancing global resilience via mitigation, disaster risk reduction, and adaptation.

#### Interconnected Policy and Action at the IO Level

Following on from these developments, global social governance as the intersecting feld of climate change and social policy (or eco-social policy) has evolved from a body of core IOs working on climate change and the environment (such as IUCN, UNEP, WMO, the IPCC, and the UNFCCC) to a wide variety of IOs with diverse mandates in the felds of migration, urbanization and population dynamics, livelihoods, health, WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), and poverty reduction, to name but a few. Nowadays, many UN specialized agencies, the World Bank, regional IOs, and the OECD may be considered global eco-social policy actors since they recognize climate change either as a direct or compounding issue for global social policy and integrate it into their work portfolios. In this section, a 'chain of connection' between climate change and various social policy areas is outlined as visible in the activities of major IOs; the starting and reference point being climate-change-induced migration.

Climate change has been recognized as early as the 1990s (including by the IPCC) as not only directly contributing toward migration and displacement (Martin 2010, 397), but also as a contributing factor in major conficts where migration and displacement are an outcome (Perch-Nielsen et al. 2008). Climate change is therefore of major concern for well-established and authoritative IOs in this area, such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In recent decades, IOM and UNHCR have lobbied for the inclusion of language that recognizes the link between climate change and human mobility in policy, including: the Hyogo Framework for Action and its successor, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR 2019); the state-led Nansen Initiative and its successor, the Platform on Disaster Displacement (McAdam 2016); and the UNFCCC Task Force on Displacement, established following the UNFCCC's twenty-frst Conference of the Parties (COP21) meeting in Paris in 2015 "to develop recommendations to avert, minimize and address displacement in the context of the adverse effects of climate change" (UNFCCC 2020b). More recently, these agencies have also played a direct role in the formation and early implementation of the nonbinding Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), which include direct recognition of the impacts of climate change on global human mobility (UNHCR 2020; UNHCR and IOM 2019; United Nations 2019).

Such increased movements of people due to environmental stress and disaster may place strain on several other intersecting social policy areas. Climate-related factors such as increased drought and fooding speed up the process of urbanization, as community centers shift from rural to urban spaces. This in turn affects livelihoods, as people shift from agrarian practices in search of new types of work in urban centers. Although such shifts may represent opportunity, they can also equate to exacerbated societal inequality if poorly managed. Several IOs are working to address climate change in this context. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) regularly partner in a research and advisory capacity, for example, to support the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA), which was adopted in 2016 (UN Habitat 2020; UNFPA 2020b). Likewise, the World Food Programme (WFP) has placed an emphasis on the need for sustainable livelihoods and ecosystems, as "every new drought or food further depletes people's assets, trapping them in a spiral of diminishing resilience and environmental misery" (World Food Programme 2020b). This has also resulted in climate change having ultimately contributed to WFP's overwhelming spending on emergency and recovery operations following climate-related disasters in recent years (World Food Programme 2020a). Further at the heart of addressing threats to livelihoods, IOs exert infuence via policy recommendations, as the International Labour Organization (ILO) has done in relation to promoting the use of social protection schemes to tackle unemployment in industries where activity must necessarily be reduced or phased out in the face of climate change, such as forestry and fossil fuel industries (Montt et al. 2018, 27). Meanwhile, other IOs have worked directly with local authorities to introduce schemes for improving livelihood opportunities for vulnerable groups. One example of this has been the introduction of hydroponic farming in food prone areas as part of the trend toward community-based adaptation projects; in Bangladesh, pilot farming projects have been supported by UNDP (UNDP 2019), and farms for Bangladeshi returnee migrants have been supported by IOM alongside national authorities as part of a sustainable economic reintegration project (IOM 2018).

Shifting dynamics among populations and means of work in turn place a strain on urban capacities and housing as more people inhabit smaller spaces and strain existing services. UN-Habitat fnds itself working at the intersection of these concerns, as it seeks to address bottle-neck issues affecting resilience and risk reduction, sustainable cities, and human mobility issues, among others (UN-Habitat 2020). Similarly, UNFPA has worked on hazard mapping in populated areas for climate change adaptation policy (POPClimate 2020), and has promoted policy practices for sustainable development and planning that set those most vulnerable to climate change on the path to a better life without contributing further to emissions and worsening climate change (UNFPA 2020a). Population shifts and ensuing challenges are in turn of direct concern for the domains of WASH, as well as health more generally, as they place societies at greater risk for a range of health implications often directly attributable to climate change, such as increased heat stress (Harlan et al. 2006), the spread of infectious disease such as malaria and cholera, malnutrition, and lack of access to clean drinking water, not to mention the mental health risks associated with livelihood and migratory-related stress. WHO has to that end emphasized the need for a continual fow of information between science, research, and policy, with their language emphasizing sustainability and measures for adaptation and reducing vulnerability (McMichael et al. 2003). Although a core authority on health, WHO is not the only viable IO considering health in the context of climate change and exerting soft governance—the aforementioned Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 has included health as a key outcome, with actions for public health outlined and prioritized by the United Nations Offce for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), WHO, and others in the UN system (Aitsi-Selmi and Murray 2016). Health is also a key area under the UNFCCC's Nairobi Work Programme, established at COP11 to convene "knowledge for action" for climate adaptation and resilience (UNFCCC 2020c), and WHO was contributing to health aspects of the Inter-Agency Committee on the Climate Agenda (IACCA)—in partnership with WMO, UNESCO, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), FAO, and ICSU—as early as 1998 (WMO et al. 1998).

In considering how interconnected such issues are, other IOs are in turn forced to address climate change in their policy work regarding vulnerable groups—such as women and children—who have been identifed as disproportionately affected, particularly in areas such as health and livelihoods (Huyer et al. 2015, 4; Preet et al. 2010, 5). IOs such as UN Women (created in 2010) are addressing climate change and exerting soft power in this area by facilitating platforms for the participation of women in decision-making, with the goal to achieve more gender-sensitive policy outcomes. This is clear in their disaster risk reduction work, where they have been active in supporting disaster management bodies at the national level in countries such as Nepal, Myanmar, Vanuatu, Bangladesh, and Kenya, and at the regional and global level alongside IO partners such as UNDRR as well as Member States to develop 'gender responsive' implementation plans and programs for the Sendai Framework (UN Women 2020b). More broadly, UN Women also focuses on economic empowerment for women within the UN's Sustainable Development Agenda, specifcally seeking combatant or adaptive solutions to climate change (UN Women 2020c). A directly observable outcome of this is the IO's facilitation of training seminars for those looking to diversify their livelihoods as part of adaptation measures (UN Women 2020a). Similarly, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has restructured its climate change policy around children as central actors, visible through their facilitation of projects in Bolivia and Papua New Guinea for youth leadership in water resources management and disaster response plans for schools, and more broadly in their provision of a platform for children and young people at United Nations events (UNICEF 2020). As part of efforts to enhance resilience in the face of climatic and environmental shocks, UNICEF and FAO have for many years engaged in and evaluated the potential for social policy schemes such as cash transfer programs to enhance the resilience of vulnerable groups in the face of climate change (Davis et al. 2016; FAO 2018; Lawlor et al. 2015).

The notion of global social governance as developed in this chapter suggests an increasing contextualization of global social policies in relation to the global threat of climate change. In other words, in the description of the causes or determinants of social problems and challenges, climate change takes an increasingly prominent role. Furthermore, as climate change plays out in multiple ways for the well-being and livelihoods of people, IOs that previously had clearly assigned mandates, roles, and responsibilities are crossing (social) policy felds in response to the global threat of climate change. In this sense, global social policy is increasingly evolving into global eco-social policy, with actors forming interconnected governance structures that merge social policy with environmental policy agendas and prescriptions. To illustrate this argument, the following section will describe climate change/risk insurance as one potential option for merging traditional social policy tools with climate change policies, highlighting the activity of and between various IOs in this area.

## 'Climate Risk Insurance' for Global Eco-Social Policy? A Case Study

Climate change is bringing IOs and other relevant partners together in new, exciting, and—as this section will show—sometimes questionable ways. Climate risk insurance, or climate (change) insurance, is both representative of emerging social policy solutions and an opportunity to refect upon the extent to which IOs are moving beyond the realm of their 'regular' work in research, advising, and assessment. Climate insurance is an example of the economization of climate change and is rather unique in its ability to bring together a wide range of actors from the public and private spheres. The proliferation of work in this area is not so surprising when considering that economic language and doctrines satisfy the liberal governance model, especially where action at the national level may be deemed insuffcient, thus opening space for IOs to exert soft power (Palmujoki 2010). Extreme weather events have been typically fnanced by a mixture of public and international disaster relief, however, as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of both sudden and slow-onset climatic events, the international community—including IOs—have been forced to question existing tools for tackling the economic consequences of climate change (Miller and Swann 2016, 81). As a result, IOs, governments, and private enterprises are all considering the potential for insurance as a tool for both adapting to and addressing potential losses and damages due to climate change. From the perspective of IOs concerned with the more wide-reaching effects of climate change on the future of sustainable development, the potential of climate insurance is arguably even more important; according to Kof Annan, former United Nations Secretary General, climate insurance "may hold answers for some of the more obstinate problems faced by the poor and the vulnerable" (Hellmuth et al. 2009, iii).

There are two major points of consensus stemming from this feld: First, that dependent on its use, climate insurance represents an option or tool for combatting the more drastic effects of climate change and for adapting to future risks and losses (International Finance Corporation 2016, 1; Montt et al. 2018, 12); and second, climate insurance must be planned, funded, and carried out by a range of actors from the public, private, and international spheres. This is in recognition of the fact that better coordination of shared approaches may result in better climate adaptation tools (Wilby et al. 2009, 1197). In other words, polycentric governance is a requirement, and this defnitively requires the involvement of IOs (Kreft et al. 2017, 24; Miller and Swann 2016, 70). Although the pervasive nature of climate change as regards wider social policy was illustrated in the last section, climate change insurance as a potential solution to many of the ills caused by climate change deserves stand-alone consideration. This is due to its ability to both bring together a unique array of actors from public, private, and international sectors, and present unique challenges that are equal parts practical, theoretical, and ethical.

The last decade has seen a proliferation of work in the feld of climate risk insurance and climate fnance more broadly, with IOs playing no small role in both establishing the concept and paving the way for future work in this area. The UNFCCC is considered the leading organization in this regard. As part of 'Cancun Agreements' at COP16 in 2010, the Green Climate Fund and 'fast-start fnance' were established, where developed countries pledged to mobilize funding which would go through IOs in the hopes of reaching populations most vulnerable to climate change (UNFCCC 2020a). The Green Climate Fund (of which the World Bank is trustee, although the Fund is subject to the COP) aims to tap into both public and private fnances in order to bankroll projects in climate change mitigation and adaptation (Green Climate Fund 2020). By 2015, the Fund had obtained over US \$10 billion in pledges and had begun approving investments (Kreft et al. 2017, 36), and despite a lack of new contributions from the United States, in the latest fundraising round (2019) developed countries pledged an additional US \$9.8 billion (Yeo 2019).

The Cancun Adaptation Framework (another result of COP16) also promoted "risk assessment and management as well as risk sharing and transfer mechanisms such as insurance at local, national, sub-regional and regional levels," and suggested the creation of a climate risk insurance facility "to address impacts associated with severe weather events" (Warner et al. 2013, 39). Perhaps most consequential for current work in this area is the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (commonly referred to as the WIM), which was established in 2013 during UNFCCC climate negotiations to look into insurance scheme options that may address climate change problems (Spreng et al. 2016, 130). States party to the UNFCCC are fully aware of the potential of climate risk insurance, with some 38 countries (representative of over four billion people and "approximately half of the world's extreme poor") privy to the 2015 Paris Agreement including climate risk insurance approaches (or at least some mention of the issue) in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) (Kreft et al. 2017, 10). There is also a consensus at the international governance level that differentiation between developed and developing countries plays an important role for future work in this area, with the G7 calling for climate change insurance schemes (Spreng et al. 2016, 130) and the UNFCCC Article 3.1.1. explicitly recognizing "differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities," with developed countries responsible for taking the lead "in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof"' (United Nations 1992, 9).

The intensive work of the UNFCCC in this area is more easily understandable when considered in relation to the bigger UN Agenda on Sustainable Development, where climate insurance holds plenty of promise. Historically, those vulnerable to risks such as environmental disasters have typically fnanced their recovery by way of "savings and credit, informal kinship arrangements, government relief and international donor support" (Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2019, 489). Insurance options may therefore relieve IOs from many of the associated costs of climate change, such as humanitarian aid. Multiple IOs have unsurprisingly begun investigative work, with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and WFP establishing a Weather Risk Management Facility in 2008 to test the feasibility of index-insurance (IFAD 2020). Nonetheless, the potential for climate insurance to pave the way for an increase in the rich-poor divide remains a concern, particularly given that climate change itself "raises awareness and willingness in populations to insure but threatens the affordability and availability of cover" (Lamond and Penning-Rowsell 2014, 2). This is something that IOs which are involved in developing policies and schemes, and for which fair and equitable sustainable development is a major reason for investing in insurance options, are concerned about. A potential issue may be increased engagement between the private sector and developed countries, at the expense of, or as a substitute for, continued offcial development assistance (ODA).

Not only is the prospect of reduced costs of interest for IOs, but wider work on climate insurance nominates IOs as middlemen for fnancing projects. For example, one study has proposed a regional fnancial mechanism funded by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and developed countries for tackling rising sea levels in Small Island Developing States based on the success of existing fnancial contributions to the African Risk Capacity (ARC), which has provided insurance to African countries affected by drought (Wenta et al. 2016). Similarly, the United Nations University (UNU) has outlined that IOs are well positioned to provide both technical and fnancial assistance, and occupy a unique position for facilitating regional and international dialogue on insurance options (Warner et al. 2013, 40). It is therefore in the interest of IOs that any mechanisms they fund be professionally researched; the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) is an example of an arrangement for research on insurance options between Munich Re and UNU (Kreft et al. 2017). Other IOs that have in the past partnered to investigate the prospects of insurance for development include Oxfam America, UNDP, WFP, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), and IFAD (Hellmuth et al. 2009).

While it has been argued that State-backed schemes provide social benefts and protection measures for vulnerable populations that purely private enterprises 'struggle to emulate,' the inclusion of IOs with specifc goals to improve the lives of target populations offers an opportunity to balance the scales against exploitation (Lamond and Penning-Rowsell 2014, 5). Conversely, partnering with IOs under the auspices of sustainable development for climate change provides an access route for insurers who are keen to exhibit altruistic qualities, as the International Finance Corporation (2016, 1), a member of the World Bank Group, has argued. To date, partnerships between private or proft-driven insurers and IOs have resulted in hybrid schemes such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a partnership where "World Bank instruments and donor funds are accessed by a private company owned and operated by its regional members to support its not-for-proft goals" (Warner et al. 2013, 30). Another example is WFP and Oxfam America's R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, which relies on donations from a range of other IOs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and insurance frms interested in extending their humanitarian work to reach hundreds of thousands of farmers in Africa to improve "resource management through asset creation," provide insurance, allow for livelihoods diversifcation, micro crediting, and improvements in savings (World Food Programme and Oxfam America 2018). Whether or not such arrangements result in pushing the Sustainable Development Agenda and tackling social problems caused by climate change, or merely facilitate access to 'emerging markets' for foreign insurance companies (potentially limiting the ability of national governments to determine their own social protection measures) remains a critical and serious question.

#### Conclusion

This chapter has traced the development of global social governance as eco-social policy with a focus on the links between climate change and social policies. It has described the temporal shift within the global discourse on climate change with an emphasis on the roles of, and collaborations between, an increasing number of IOs. It has explored some interconnected issues of social and climate change policies and highlighted how many IOs are engaged in the feld. In a third step, it was shown using the example of climate risk insurance how an insurance mechanism brings actors and efforts together within multi-actored and multi-level processes to facilitate tackling individual social shocks caused by climate change, as well as how such a tool may bundle the resources and capacities of IOs involved.

More specifcally, this chapter has outlined advancements in discourse at the IO level on climate change and how this connects to global social policies. It has illustrated how a shift toward framing climate change in the context of sustainable development has led to a ballooning of IOs engaged in this area. The argument that IOs occupy an important space as conveners and for exerting infuence—particularly 'soft' governance—when it comes to social policy and climate change, has been shown with the example of climate risk insurance.

This argument is, however, specifc to the perspective on global ecosocial governance employed: Gough (2014) has, for example, considered green growth and how economic and social policies come together with reference to that perspective. Here, a lot of questions remain concerning the ability of IOs to counter the interests of powerful, economically oriented states or big business. Nonetheless, eco-social policies, the links between climate change and social policies, and the specifc roles of IOs (and other actors) is still highly underexplored, and considering global social governance as global eco-social policy is a perspective in need of further consideration in the years and decades to come.

#### References


https://www.nature.com/news/policy-map-the-interactions-betweensustainable-development-goals-1.20075. Accessed April 19, 2020.


bodies/executive-committee-of-the-warsaw-international-mechanism-for-lossand-damage-wim-excom/workshops-meetings/cop24-side-eventrecommendations-of-the-task-force-on-displacement. Accessed 5 May, 2020.


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# Water as Global Social Policy—International Organizations, Resource Scarcity, and Environmental Security

# *Jeremy J. Schmidt*

#### Introduction

If you pick up a book on water politics—practically *any* book on the topic – you are almost certain to fnd a claim like this: water doesn't obey political boundaries. Usually, the quick inference is that water conficts are likely; a logical step that combines the fact that water began fowing eons before politics were around to be obeyed with the political reality that many international borders operate with varying degrees of reference to scarce water resources. An arguably more interesting point, however, is the leitmotif such claims convey. Namely, that global water policy requires an effective combination of space and politics. Among the potential combinations, several leading contenders populate a wide literature. There are spaces of empires, nations, states, mega-cities, agricultural regions, watersheds (or river basins), local communities, Indigenous peoples and, increasingly, aquatic ecosystems themselves. Opposite these, politics

J. J. Schmidt (\*)

Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: jeremy.schmidt@durham.ac.uk

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 275

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_12

crisscross state sovereignty, treaties, rights, customs, Indigenous laws, technical criteria, infrastructure, economics, guesswork, and in some cases, equity. Intersections of space and politics anchor two aims of this chapter. The frst is to map how International Organizations (IOs) have shaped, and continue to shape, global water policy. The second is to consider how IOs have infuenced global discourses. These two aims support a more ambitious argument: that water be treated as global social policy – not as merely instrumental to the public management of social risks in other domains.

This chapter has four sections: The frst defends a key premise of the argument that water is *social* and not only *natural*. The second maps the historical role IOs have played in colonial and state hydrological programs. Here, IOs actively shaped key parameters of what it meant to act *internationally* on water policy. This affected the subsequent rise of *global* water policy. The third identifes the role of IOs in driving discourses of global water policy, particularly those of scarcity and security that link the environmental, economic, and political risks connected to water. Here, there are similarities with other environmental areas where Cold War scientifc networks collaborated with IOs to forge global approaches to social policy through hybrid networks of epistemic authority. But there are also important differences owing to how IOs critiqued early approaches to sustainable development for inadequate attention to water. This catalyzed efforts to make water central to social and industrial policy, largely through what is known as integrated water resources management (IWRM). That project reached its height in the 1990s. The fourth section focuses on how, as IWRM waned, IOs redeployed their infuence to govern considerations of risk and security in response to global environmental change and economic crises. This approach now dominates global water discourse and demands critique regarding *for whom* water has become a domain of global social policy.

#### Social Water

Water is not taught as something that is social. In fact, only a small fraction of the diagrams used to represent Earth's water cycle in textbooks include humans (15%) and even fewer (2%) identify human impacts on the global water system (Abbott et al. 2019). This is a serious oversight. Humans have been appropriating more than half of the annual available freshwater since 1995 and have pushed the hydrological cycle so far off balance that it no longer operates within the normal bounds of variability (Postel et al. 1996; Milly et al. 2008). The upshot is that the image most people have in their heads of the global water cycle – implicit in much of water policy – is deeply fawed. Water does not fow carefree through an eternal, stable cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation from the oceans through the atmosphere and back to earth. To that image, we must add a growing litany of ways in which humans short-circuit water systems: microplastics in raindrops, pharmaceutical loading in rivers, tens of thousands of mega-dams, increased water vapor from climate change, glaciers and ice sheets in rapid retreat, a warming and increasingly acidic ocean, severe droughts, and monsoons that by turns fail to materialize or intensely burst in ways not previously experienced.

How can we think of water in social terms? Anthropologists have described water as a "total social fact" owing to how it is not only biophysically necessary for social life, but also constitutive of multiple institutions of social life (economic, religious, health) such that decisions in one domain cannot be cleanly parsed from others (Orlove and Caton 2010, 402). Part of this has to do with the materiality of water itself and the fact that it is shared by upstream and downstream communities, cities, and nations. Another aspect, however, is water's position amid social norms. For instance, access to water, such as for household connections, often functions as the material and social site for making demands on the state for public goods, and even for citizenship itself (von Schnitzler 2016; Anand 2017). Anthropologists are not alone in their assessment of water as not wholly social but not only natural. Geographers and many others have similarly studied the constitutive role of water in social relations. Recently, this approach has also been extended to connect the practices of scientists and hydrologists to global discourses (Schmidt 2017; Dry 2019). This provides a route to think about water both socially and globally and, I argue here, to consider the historic role of IOs in forging these links. Among the earliest attempts to think of water globally and socially was by Julian Huxley (1935, 1943), the enthusiastic eugenicist and United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organisation's (UNESCO) frst Director-General, who lauded the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States for its model of integrating water control and social policy across education, health, and rural development. Huxley thought the TVA a model for UNESCO itself. The most infuential instance of water as social policy, however, is surely cost-beneft analysis, which was given its original expression in the 1936 *Flood Control Act* in the United States before it went on to become virtually ubiquitous in social, economic, and environmental policy (Porter 1995; Kysar 2010).

Understanding water socially also provides resources for examining contests and conficts. It does so by virtue of identifying how different social practices – legal, economic, scientifc, religious – are themselves not free of the material constraints water sets: it evaporates, it gets polluted, it fows, it foods, it erodes infrastructure, it squirrels away across property boundaries, and it is variable in its distribution over space and time. As a result, politics are not external to the practices that give an account of where water is and when. That we can think of water socially, however, still requires an approach to doing so. Mine will become evident throughout the chapter (see Schmidt 2017) as one set against popular versions of social constructivists in which water is wholly social; a hydro*social* cycle such as Linton (2010, 3) proposes when he argues that "Water is what we make of it." Water can be many things, but a fouter of physics is not among them. As a result, centering the material account of water is key. Where does this leave us with respect to the politics of international organizations? First, we can follow others who have laid the groundwork for thinking of IOs in the water sector as entangled with social confict, contests, and discourses not suffciently captured by theories of rational decision making (Conca 2006; cf. Murphy 1994). Second, we can recognize that, like other domains of global social policy, changes in the water sector frequently pace changes in global governance generally. Here, we can extend Abbott et al.'s (2016) analysis of how structures of global governance shift to also think about their material undercurrents. To do so, this chapter contests the premise of historically powerful actors that water be treated non-socially – as merely a 'natural resource'—in the frst place (Schmidt 2017; Scott 1998).

## From River Basin Organizations to Global IOs: Historical Context

Historically, water IOs are of two main types. One is populated by international river basin organizations (RBOs) that are spatially oriented to transboundary waters shared by two or more countries. Often, though not always, these are organized according to the physical space that directs water fows – the river basin or watershed. Owing to the diversity of these political and spatial environments, RBOs exhibit considerable variety, diversity, and levels of authority (see Schmeier 2012; Lautze et al. 2013). Some operate at the level of treaties, others advise (offcially or unoffcially) on technical or economic concerns, some are imposed, still others limp along. RBOs often refect regional and transnational power relations that establish discursive and material hegemony – hydro-hegemony – over transboundary waters (Mirumachi 2015; Warner et al. 2017). There are presently over 120 RBOs that operate on 110 international watercourses worldwide; a tally dutifully kept in an open-access database by Oregon State University's Program in Water Confict Management and Transformation.1 In 1997, the UN Watercourses Convention was adopted to provide international norms regarding the use and conservation of water crossing international borders. This was accomplished largely by codifying existing utilitarian norms as the basis for pursuing equitable water sharing arrangements (Blatter and Ingram 2001). Where did these norms come from? A second group of IOs played a key role. This group includes actors more familiar to other domains of global social policy and which also infuenced RBOs, such as the World Bank. These IOs are not constrained to watersheds or state territories, and often are explicitly oriented to projects advantageous to global industry, agricultural trade, and fnance. In this section, and as Fig. 12.1 illustrates, I provide a snapshot of how RBO experiences and IO interactions infuenced one another and how both began to shift when 'global' water policy began to take shape with the launch of UNESCO's International Hydrological Decade.

Projects of state-making often exercised control over water as a constitutive aspect of spatial rule. These projects could have international dimensions if either water itself crossed existing borders between states or when colonial powers appropriated water elsewhere. Mitchell (2002) argues that colonial thinking about water, space, and politics continues to exert contemporary infuence. He's correct. The draining of marshes for farmland and cities, the damming and straightening of rivers, and the establishment and maintenance of irrigation infrastructure all provide the material evidence for the moral ordering of water under different state-making projects (Scott 1998; Pisani 2002; Blackbourn 2006; Pritchard 2011; Gilmartin 2015; Pietz 2015). When these state-making projects were exported to colonies they remade landscapes and social relationships (Mitchell 2002; D'Souza 2006; Bhattacharyya 2018). In so doing,

<sup>1</sup> See: https://transboundarywaters.science.oregonstate.edu/content/international-riverbasin-organization-rbo-database. Accessed March 21, 2020.

**Fig. 12.1** Global water policy IOs: scale and discourse

colonialism exported not only techniques for controlling water, but also an approach to water politics aligned to Eurocentric, racialized notions of the 'international' constituted by recognition and reciprocity among sovereign nations (Pitts 2018).

For instance, as Yao (2019) shows, 'control over nature' was central to how the 'international' was constituted in nineteenth century debates over civilization and progress. These debates stem from the frst international RBO: the Danube Commission established in 1856. The Danube Commission was especially occupied with whether Russia's lack of territorial control over the Danube River met (or did not meet) the Eurocentric 'standard of civilization' (Yao 2019). A peculiar, if not quite universal feature of applying the so-called 'standard of civilization' was the predominance of engineering as both a practice and disposition to reconciling water with political boundaries. One can only control nature with the right tools, and engineering was a main one. There were many complicating factors to using engineering as a kind of social test, especially owing to the challenges that arose when water control required technical feats that engineering hadn't yet mastered (Mukerji 2009). But there were advantages to using engineering for social ends because it was the kind of expertise that could travel. Facilitated by colonial networks like those of the Dutch and British, engineers shaped and reshaped landscapes across the Middle East, and South and South East Asia (Fasseur 1992; Amrith 2018). Beyond overt colonialism, engineering became a key practice for harnessing water in ways that aligned standards of civilization premised on the 'control of nature' with the spatialization of 'international' water politics. In short, to qualify for reciprocal international agreements was to be able to engineer control over water.

The emergence of transnational water engineering expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to a diverse set of discursive and technical practices for states and for RBOs (Teisch 2011). Owing to considerable diversity across RBOs (see Mukhtarov and Gerlak 2013), I focus not on the historical contingencies of individual RBOs but rather on how state-making projects began to intersect with the IOs that act globally. The Indian case provides an excellent example: The frst major hydrological project after India gained independence from Britain was a multi-purpose river basin development scheme for irrigation, electricity, and food control in West Bengal. The Damodar Valley Corporation (still in operation today) established the idea of a 'nationalist engineer' as one who controlled water in lockstep with advancing national Indian identity (Klingensmith 2007). The explicit organizational model for the Damodar Valley Corporation was the TVA of the United States, a factor that mattered critically in a confict over the Indus River on the eastern side of India with neighboring Pakistan in 1951. In that case, tensions over how to share the Indus river were at fever pitch after the World Bank struggled to broker a deal between the two nations. Then, the second director of the TVA, David Lilienthal, managed to get both parties to the table, in part by appealing to the American model of development as a common discourse for multi-purpose river basin planning (Mason and Asher 1973; Ekbladh 2010; Gilmartin 2015).

In the Indus case, a shared ethos of water control and state identity helped shoulder the burden of international negotiation that allowed expertise from the TVA to frst shape 'nationalist' engineers in India and then broker an RBO mediated by the World Bank. The Indian case was not entirely unique. Post-WWII, America's TVA was exported to dozens of countries as the quintessential model of 'international development' promoted by UN agencies, such as UNESCO (see Scott 2006; Ekbladh 2010). Notably in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, the TVA provided a key organizational model (Biggs 2006; Ekbladh 2010). In 1957, the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East backed the creation of the Mekong Committee (later the Interim Mekong Committee) following the independence of Cambodia, Laos PDR, and Vietnam from France (Matthews and Schmidt 2014). The creation of an RBO on the Mekong subsequently went through different permutations as the seven countries making claims to the river sought – or were compelled to seek – an international coordinating organization (Gardner 1997; Biggs 2011). The cases of the Indus and Mekong also speak to a larger dynamic in which the control of water was increasingly connected to broader, global discourses about international coordination for development.

One effect of using the river basin, or watershed, as the spatial scale for RBOs was the emergence of a discourse on integrated river basin planning by the United Nations (1958; White 1957). Driven by the insight that it is better to coordinate the use of shared waters than not to, RBOs and IOs soon developed a shared discourse of integration. However, and as even a quick perusal of the University of Oregon's RBO database reveals, the organizational structure, funding mechanisms, and economic and datasharing agreements among RBOs vary widely and do not easily reveal a straightforward model of 'integration' (cf. Schmeier 2012). This diversity posed challenges for fostering international norms of integration for RBOs, exemplifed by the fact that it took four decades until the UN convention on watercourses was adopted in 1997. It may be too strong to draw direct causal links, but that convention was made more likely as the result of IOs who moved RBO discourses on 'integration' from the international sphere to the global.

#### IOs and Global Water Policy

The shift from *international* to *global* water politics offcially began in 1977 with the United Nations Conference on Water in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The impetus for the 1977 conference was not water control per se, but rather an integrated global approach to water that individual states had no prospect of controlling. Namely, the cumulative effects of water use that could affect the global water cycle itself. A decade earlier, that concern had been the catalyst for hydrologists in the United States to propose an International Hydrological Decade (IHD), which was convened by UNESCO from 1965–74. The IHD operated, like many international scientifc networks during the Cold War, by appealing to – indeed establishing notions of – scientifc objectivity presumed independent of national interests (cf. Reisch 2005; Wolfe 2018). Directed by the American Raymond Nace, the IHD combined Russian hydrological expertise with an expansive network of international engineers and scientists. It was through the IHD, in fact, that hydrology 'came of age' as a science, as Nace (1980) would later put it. In this section, I outline how, as the search for 'integration' moved from the *international* to the *global,* existing IOs evolved and new IOs began to populate global water policy.

Although UNESCO formally convened the IHD, it also reached out to the World Meteorological Organization (previously known as the International Meteorological Organization). Again, space and politics combined to socially affect water as international scientifc collaborations established and standardized the feld of global hydrology. This time, as Nace (1967, 550) captured at the outset of the IHD, the issue was that water challenges were "a global problem with local roots." That is, a challenge of linking local temporal and spatial variability at the scale of individual watersheds to the global water cycle. The task of IHD scientists was to link these scales objectively. Indeed, the goal was to ft scientifc hydrology with universal categories, such as those implied by Nace's (1969) interim report entitled *Water and Man: A World View*. Supporting this project, a raft of reports told similar stories of 'water and man' and the universal co-evolution of hydrology and societies. These did not displace the racial categories entrained in the 'international' and instead universalized human-water histories in more teleological fashion, where evolution toward global water politics naturally refected social progress (e.g. Biswas 1970; Fitzsimmons and Salama 1977).

At the mid-point of the IHD, in 1971, a new expert IO was created. The International Water Resources Association (IWRA) evolved out of the American Water Resources Association and held its frst World Water Congress in 1973 in Chicago. The IWRA quickly became a key global knowledge broker as its epistemic community helped forge the emerging discourse of global water policy through meetings and its journal, *Water International*, which it launched in 1975. By the end of the IHD, in 1974, the familiar empirical picture of the hydrological cycle critiqued above – lacking people – had quantifed the global water system. After the IHD ended, a series of international events and actors began to prepare for the 1977 UN Conference on Water in Mar del Plata. The IWRA, as well as the International Institute of Environment and Development (also founded in 1971) began to partner with global organizations such as UNESCO, HABITAT, and the World Bank to orient global water governance toward a dual assessment of water's global distribution as mapped against human needs. At Mar del Plata, these two pillars provided the basis for a new discourse of water scarcity that ported the scientifc objectivity of global hydrology over to social policy. The putatively objective basis of the new discourse on water scarcity provided a way to incorporate the engineering of water control with social policy in what was known as Rational Planning (Biswas 1978). Rational Planning was not unique to water (see Lindblom 1999), but in this sector it used water's statistical variability in any particular state as the basis for decision making. These statistical distributions continue to travel widely and have been rehearsed innumerable times in descriptions of the Earth's water, in which oceans account for around 97% of the total water on the planet, freshwater only 3%. Of the latter, most is locked in ice or deep underground, with the remaining freshwater comprising a scarce reservoir that ought to be managed rationally to achieve utilitarian ends of maximum well-being. This empirical account was bolstered by the water atlas published by UNESCO just after the IHD ended (Korzoun et al. 1978).

Discourses of water scarcity established in Mar del Plata arrived just prior to the widespread adoption of neoliberal policies that sought an enhanced – in some versions exclusive – role for free markets in environmental sectors. At Mar del Plata, similar ideas were in circulation as the idea of water scarcity was interpreted by the World Bank as requiring forms of water pricing to enhance conservation (Warford 1978). As neoliberal policies were applied in structural adjustment programs in Chile and elsewhere in the 1980s (often supported by the World Bank and other parties to the 'Washington Consensus') they became a live testing ground that produced mixed results not only for privatization but also for discourses of global water policy (Bauer 2004; Goldman 2005; Boelens et al. 2010). Through discourses of water scarcity, however, an emerging role for water specifc IOs arose. By this time, the International Water Resources Association had convened its World Water Congress several times since its inaugural launch in the 1970s, and routinized meetings involving scientists, government offcials, and non-governmental organizations met every 2 or 3 years. This meant that when neoliberalism hit the ground there was already an established global network of water expertise intersecting with other IOs such as the World Bank or the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (see Schmidt 2017).

The IWRA proved a critical IO in the 1980s, especially in its response to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development report, *Our Common Future*, also known as the Brundtland Report on sustainable development. Members of the IWRA (1991) critiqued *Our Common Future* for what they perceived as insuffcient attention to water issues. Then, determined not to let the upcoming opportunity to put water on the sustainable development agenda at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 pass, they organized a preliminary meeting in Dublin. The conference produced what are known as the "Dublin Principles," which concretized neoliberal policies in many respects by declaring that water "has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good" (Dublin Statement 1992, np). The principle came fourth in a list, and as a way to integrate water's environmental importance, the need for participatory forms of management, and the unique role of women in provisioning and safeguarding water under conditions of scarcity. It also became a fashpoint of confict and contest as IOs began to push the idea of integrated water resources management, or IWRM, based on the Dublin Principles into global sustainability agendas.

Through IOs like the World Bank, UNESCO, and the IWRA, the idea of IWRM became virtually hegemonic in the 1990s as a way to integrate human and environmental water uses while maximizing human well-being (Conca 2006). The upshot of IWRM's 'integration' of global hydrology and water pricing was congruent with what Bernstein (2001) described as the "liberal compromise" of sustainable development: the promotion of markets as the most effective instrument for environmental relief. This compromise solidifed further in the 1990s through the creation of new IOs that carried both a technical and social remit, such as the Global Water Partnership (GWP) in 1996. The Global Water Partnership (2000) soon established itself as a key knowledge broker through a series of infuential Technical Reports on IWRM that argued water was both a social and economic good (Rogers et al. 1998). The GWP continues to play a key role in promoting IWRM worldwide as it has expanded to include over 3000 partner organizations in 183 countries. The same year, the World Water Council was launched. An outcome of a special session at the IWRA World Water Congress in 1994, this new IO sought more direct political infuence for the water sector in global economic and environmental policy. It quickly launched its own journal, *Water Policy*, to help establish credibility as a multi-stakeholder convenor and also began to convene triennial World Water Forums. Its editor-in-chief, Jerome Delli Priscoli (2000), explicitly sought to naturalize 'integration' in the water sector; he claimed it arose from a universal human longing to return to the comfort of the womb.

#### Water IOs: From IWRM to Global Social Risks

At the turn of the new millennium, water IOs took stock. Many of the projects promoting IWRM were faltering, often critiqued for weighting technical criteria of water control too heavily and not paying suffcient attention to social contexts or institutions (Blomquist and Schlager 2005; Dellapenna and Gupta 2008). Even for the World Bank (2004) IWRM had lost its luster, not least owing to backlash against water privatization and social resistance to neoliberalism (see Olivera 2004). Adding further urgency was the 2006 United Nations Development Program (2006) report on the inequitable connections of water scarcity, social power, and poverty. The ensuing reappraisal of IWRM, however, also took place in a context where humans were altering the global water system (Schmidt 2013). The rational approach to water scarcity soon incorporated emerging, adaptive approaches to resource management and governance as well as emerging discourses of water security to bridge from existing IWRM programs to structural governance changes (Cook and Bakker 2012). Here, water's materiality once again constrained and compelled policy responses.

Established IOs and new intervenors navigated the challenge of institutional inertia around IWRM – including development and fnancing commitments – and efforts to reckon with new social and biophysical realities. The IWRA continued convening the World Water Congress while the World Water Council hosted its World Water Forum. The World Water Forums in the Hague (2000) and Kyoto/Shiga/Osaka (2003) brought together experts and government ministers to align the water sector with the sustainability agenda then taking shape around the Millennium Development Goals. Experts in the water sector, however, were beginning to wonder openly whether the discursive consensus of IWRM and water scarcity were enough, or effective (Biswas 2004; Gleick and Lane 2005). A signifcant element of the discontent was unease about the conceptual lock-in of IWRM at a time when evidence was mounting that humans were increasingly driving the global hydrological cycle – both through direct, large-scale appropriation of water and through indirect changes to land cover and the global climate system (see Vörösmarty et al. 2004). Several factors led, in fairly rapid succession, to a decade of intense transformation in how IOs affected global water policy: (1) The World Economic Forum established itself as an independent assessor of progress toward the Millennium Development Goals in 2004, and soon began publishing annual risk reports on the state of "global risks" (Schmidt and Matthews 2018). (2) Energy and food price shocks in the years preceding the 2008 global fnancial crisis led Ban Ki-moon to ask the World Economic Forum to focus on water security at the 2009 meeting in Davos. (3) This led to the World Economic Forum (2011) using its discursive infuence to establish water security as linked to shared structural risks linking across what is now known as the water-energy-food nexus (Schmidt and Matthews 2018; cf. Pigman 2007). Together, these changes added to notions of water scarcity a growing recognition of water security that prompted IOs in global water policy to shift away from efforts to use water as the material basis for 'integrating' various domains of social policy. Instead, the water-energy-food nexus established a different normative basis; water was *already* integrated across multiple social policy domains that produced systemic risks to the global water cycle and to the global economy. As such, the task of policy was to govern this form of integration; or what the World Economic Forum (2011) described as the structural undervaluation of water in the global economy.

Established IOs such as the Global Water Partnership responded to these changes by renovating existing institutional stances. For instance, the GWP built on its earlier report on *Water as a Social and Economic Good* and its defense of the Dublin Principles in 1998 through a new technical report on *Water Financing and Governance* amid the 2008 global fnancial crisis (Rogers et al. 1998; Rees et al. 2008). Indeed, paralleling the broader fnancialization of the global economy (see Krippner 2012), the water sector turned to fnancial tools for global water policy, such as the use of credit risk ratings, debt-for-water swaps, microcredit schemes and infrastructure fnancing to address issues of water security across the water-energy-food nexus (see Kolker et al. 2016; Schmidt and Matthews 2018). The Global Water Partnership (2012) made special use of resilience to link the systemic risks to water-energy-food nexus and the global economy. Here, the water sector paced broader policy discourses that had adopted the language resilience after the 2008 fnancial crisis to bridge environmental and economic risks (Cooper 2011). Responses to energy, food, climate and fnancial crises, however, were not suffcient: The Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation was not met. Worldwide, billions of people still lack basic sanitation infrastructure and hundreds of millions lack access to clean, reliable drinking water.

In 2010, the United Nations passed the Human Right to Water and Sanitation. The landmark agreement created a key moment for IOs and for states, many of whom had drifted toward (if they had not already embraced) enhanced uses of market mechanisms in the water sector. The response of IOs created new contests, particularly as new networks like the World Economic Forum engaged with large corporate actors (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé) to forge new working groups, such as the 2030 Working Group, that sought input into the Sustainable Development Goals. While civil society organizations interpreted the Human Right to Water and Sanitation as a clear victory over privatization and other neoliberal agendas, many global IOs took the view that the best way to deliver on the right to water was through the market. Here, World Bank programs on "water for all" that had established transnational policy expertise sought to capture the right to water and to channel it into existing structures of political economy (Goldman 2009). Debates over the right to water continue, especially as different approaches to utilizing the right are mobilized across different legal and social contexts (see Langford and Russell 2017; Sultana and Loftus 2020).

A fnal, further twist was added to the feld of IOs as the OECD (2013, 2017) began to position itself with respect to water security, global governance, and the nexus of land, water, and energy. The OECD had long had an interest in water and governance, and its increased attention to the portfolio came just as the UN created the High-Level Panel on Water as part of its efforts to develop political momentum to deliver on the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Here, water policy refected shifts in global governance that increasingly use 'goals' or targets to steer both states and markets (see Kanie and Biermann 2017). The UN High-Level Panel likewise used the language of resilience to describe complex systems in terms of responses to disturbance, and as being subject to critical thresholds, shocks, and tipping-points. These descriptions of interconnected economic and environmental systems mirrored the discourse of the Sustainable Development Goals, where resilience was increasingly used to link global environmental risks to the sustainability agendas (e.g. Sachs 2015). From 2016 to 2018, the UN High-Level Panel on Water completed its frst major initiative on "valuing water" and committed to the human right to water while positioning that right amid discourses of enhancing resilience across economic and environmental systems (Schmidt 2020). In so doing, the High-Level Panel did not, as originally hoped, get through the bricolage of global water contests. Instead, it has reaffrmed the central discourses IOs have developed and employed by naturalizing the form of 'integration' achieved under neoliberal programs through which human impacts on the global water cycle, and the Earth system in general, have been amplifed (see also Schmidt 2019).

#### Conclusion

IOs have played multiple, critical roles in global water policy. There is much more to be researched and examined about them – water continues to disobey political boundaries. The aim of this chapter has been to argue for a treatment of water as global social policy. To do so requires tracking the architecture of arguments through which a particular and powerful social view of water has come to dominate global water governance through discourses of control, integration, scarcity, and security. This has involved IOs working in multiple ways to: negotiate international agreements, facilitate international scientifc collaborations, defne integrated approaches to water management, and to align water with emerging development agendas in the context of economic and environmental crises.

There are many dissenting narratives occluded from, and deliberately excluded by, the current architecture of global water governance. The upshot is that the water risks faced by those marginalized in intersectional ways across both urban and rural areas, and in view of colonial histories and ongoing settler colonial structures, remain unaddressed. And this is only to constrain the explication of risks to our own species. One implication of the foregoing argument is that further, critical study of water as global social policy is paramount to reckoning with the social power that continues to be wielded through control over it. A second is that, in order to follow through on not treating water as merely instrumental to other policy domains, it is essential to confront the material reality that multiple other domains – such as health, education, and industry – are interdependent with water. So, it will not do to think of water non-socially, nor to hope we can make whatever we like out of water. Rather, it is imperative to treat water as not only natural and not wholly social, and to develop an architecture for global social policy capacious enough to govern water equitably.

#### References


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# International Organizations and Food: Nearing the End of the Lean Season?

*Anna Wolkenhauer*

### Introduction

Food is many things. Most essentially, it is a source of nutrition—a source of life. Food is also culture, identity, and history. It provides autonomy and independence. And food embodies humans' relationship to the land. It is a source of income; a tradeable product and a global commodity. Food is a precious good and a vulnerable one too. Given its diversity of qualities and functions, how can food be delineated as an object of global social policy? If social policy is not only taken to include redistributive and protective interventions, but likewise those that aim to improve individuals' productive capacities and ability to earn an income (Mkandawire 2010), then food security comprises not only the "access to suffcient, safe and nutritious food that meets [people's] dietary needs and food

I thank Felix Anderl, Stephen Devereux, and the editors for much-valued feedback on an earlier draft. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

A. Wolkenhauer (\*)

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail: anna.wolkenhauer@uni-bremen.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 297

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_13

preferences for an active and healthy life" (FAO et al. 2019, 186), but also access to the means of production.

At least since the food price hikes and subsequent crises of 2008 and 2011, food security has become a global concern. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated at the time that "the number of undernourished people in the world in 2008 [was] 915 million […], the highest [absolute] number estimated over the past 3–4 decades" (FAO 2009, 104). Four famines were recorded between 2000 and 2011, all of them in Africa (Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia) (Devereux 2018a, 195). In 2019, the FAO found that the number of people who suffered from hunger was again on the rise, reaching over 820 million, with the largest share of undernourishment (almost 20 percent of the population) in Sub-Saharan Africa (FAO et al. 2019, 3). Achieving food security and the reduction of hunger are key aims in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they remain far from reached ten years out from the target year 2030.

International policies on food have historically been marked by a tension between visions of a global regulatory agency mandated to ensure equitable food supplies across the world and concerns about trade interests. While the more radical vision drove the initial post-war formation of the FAO, it was soon undermined by the widespread reliance on market forces, as promoted especially by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). In the course of time, food policy became enmeshed with broader agendas of poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, while structural adjustment undercut productive capacities in the Global South. This history is important to understand not only the lack of success of international efforts at reducing global hunger, but also the current architecture of arguments in global food policy.

At present, the feld of global food policy is marked by the reemergence of productive concerns, however, the realization of these concerns is somewhat constrained by the international free trade system institutionalized through the World Trade Organization (WTO). Within these boundaries, international agricultural institutions provide technical research, humanitarian relief, and linkages between food and other social policy programs, while the underlying structural causes for food insecurity largely remain in place. Thus, large parts of the populations in the Global South remain unable to secure suffcient food, despite working in agriculture.

The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. The next section traces the history of the major international organizations (IOs) since their respective founding dates and discusses discursive and policy shifts up until the turn of the millennium. The third section then looks at contemporary debates around food and revisits the major IOs that were previously introduced. The chapter concludes that despite the narrowing of the discourse about food security, new movements can be distilled that promise to reopen some of the neglected debates about food and its production.

## History: IOs and Food Policy in the Twentieth Century

#### *Constituting the Post-Colonial Order*

Food has been a global issue long before it became institutionalized as a policy feld of international organizations after the Second World War (WWII). Questions of international trade and agricultural policies have long been interlinked, and during the colonial era, the securing of agricultural products was a central motivation for the European conquest of countries in the Global South (Orford 2015, 9). The International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) was founded in 1905 and was the frst formal initiative to create a global mechanism for exchanging information on commodities. Based in Rome, the IIA conducted a number of conferences between 1920 and 1934 and would later be integrated into the FAO (Staples 2006, 69; Liese 2012, 114). In 1937, the Permanent Agricultural Committee of the International Labour Organization (ILO) was set up to deal with problems related to agricultural labor (Nelson 1949, 525). In the interwar period, hunger came to be seen as a major global problem (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 102), urban-rural disparities came to the fore (Forclaz 2019, 354), and knowledge about the importance of adequate nutrition grew (Staples 2006, 68–69).

Connecting nutrition and production, the FAO of the United Nations was conceived during the last years of WWII and offcially founded through the approval of its constitution by representatives of 44 member states in October 1945 (Shaw 2007, 9). The preamble of the FAO's constitution described its mandate as raising nutrition levels, improving the effciency of food production, contributing to rural development, and expanding the world economy overall (Phillips 1981, 9).

In 1946, a Rural Welfare Division was set up to act as an overarching unit that would connect the various technical divisions of the FAO, which were in turn responsible for fsheries, forestry, and other specialized felds (Forclaz 2019, 355). The Division was directed by Horace Belshaw, who adopted a holistic approach to rural development, attributed key importance to local knowledge and subjective measures of well-being, and was skeptical of overly top-down, expert-driven development programs (Forclaz 2019, 352–53, 359). The Division acted like the "conscience of FAO in rural welfare matters" (Phillips 1981, 128). In these early years, the FAO aimed to strengthen smallholder agriculture, as increasing their production would improve health and living standards as well as food availability (Forclaz 2019, 356). The approach taken by the FAO experts was informed by historical lessons, such as from Denmark's redistributive land reform and support to smallholders (Forclaz 2019, 358).

The FAO formulated a vision for a global food system which refected the wider post-war optimism that global problems could be resolved through international cooperation (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 99–100). One of the early propositions came from its frst Director General, John Boyd Orr. He presented to the FAO's 1946 conference the idea of setting up a World Food Board for holding buffer stocks and for providing credit to developing countries (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 109). The food held by the Board was supposed to be used for famine relief and sold at reduced prices to countries in need (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011). It would also use its stockholding to prevent a fall in prices that might discourage food production (Staples 2006, 85–86). At the same time, it was hoped that the Board would thereby contribute to peace between nations (Staples 2006, 87).

While the conference initially approved of Orr's suggestion and set up a commission tasked with thinking out the details, the idea was eventually buried upon opposition from the US and the UK, who feared losing autonomy over trade policies (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 110). Both were opposed to a strong FAO with regulatory powers and preferred an organizationally weak institution that would concentrate on offering technical advice, like the IIA had done previously (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 107–08). Others, notably Latin American countries would have preferred an FAO with more far-reaching powers (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011). Ultimately, instead of creating a World Food Board, it became a national undertaking for many countries to hold food buffer stocks, while international policies revolved around economic growth with the belief that this would eventually enable everyone to buy suffcient food (Staples 2006, 92–93). The 1950s were the height of modernization theories, which were focused on industrialization more than on agricultural development (Frey and Unger 2017, 11–12; Maxwell 2001, 39).

The FAO's second Director General, Norris E. Dodd, who was in offce from 1948 until 1953, again tried to endow the FAO with powers to balance out price fuctuations in food commodities, but his proposal was equally rejected (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 112). In the 1950s, the FAO then slowly gave up on its grand visions and resorted to focusing on technical assistance (Staples 2006, 99). Parallel to reducing its ambitions, the FAO's budget on the contrary grew. Supplementing its own small budget, the rapidly growing UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA, later to become the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)) doubled its funds to the FAO as part of its increased rural development aid (Forclaz 2019, 361). Consequently, the FAO's ability to undertake short-term technical assignments upon request by member governments grew (Forclaz 2019). The largest number of experts deployed came from the US and other Western countries and the way in which these technical missions worked was short-term, without much familiarity with the broader socio-economic contexts of receiving countries (Forclaz 2019, 363). The shift toward "piece-meal" technical tasks was further underlined in 1951, when the Rural Welfare Division was dismantled and reduced to a sub-division of the agriculture division in conjunction with the FAO headquarters moving from Washington to Rome (Forclaz 2019, 361; Phillips 1981, 128).

Food defcits gained renewed attention in the 1960s. Under the framework of its "Freedom from Hunger" campaign, the FAO increased its budget by 350 percent and further expanded its technical assistance programs in developing countries (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 114; Phillips 1981, 72). In the same year, the United Nations adopted a resolution to distribute food through the UN system to "food-defcit" populations (Shaw 2009, 59). At the time, the US had been accumulating large food surpluses and had created its own "Offce of Food for Peace" in the Executive Offce of the president (Shaw 2009). The FAO warned that "dumping" large amounts of food could have negative consequences on receiving countries, and led the initiative to develop a system through which food aid could be used as part of the larger global developmental effort rather than as a political tool (Shaw 2009, 60; Shaw 2001, 3). This became the rationale for the creation of the World Food Program (WFP) in 1961 (Shaw 2009, 62–63). The US, however, made sure that this would coexist with, rather than replace, bilateral food aid programs (Shaw 2009). The WFP was created with a dual mandate: to provide long-term developmental, and short-term humanitarian assistance (Shaw 2001, 2), with the relative weight between the two shifting back and forth over time.1 In the frst three decades after its creation, the WFP directed twothirds of its resources toward developmental interventions, mainly through "food for work" and school feeding programs, and one-third toward emergencies (Shaw 2009, 76). This would reverse in the 1990s (Shaw 2009). Another important change concerned the sourcing of the food. The WFP shifted from using donated food from donor countries toward tapping into local and regional food markets (Maxwell 2008).

Last, the World Bank (WB) was one of the early organizations engaged in food policies after WWII. Under the World Bank Group, the International Development Association (IDA) was created in 1960 to offer loans on concessional terms, and the World Bank's overall aim turned toward poverty reduction (Shaw 2009, 71–76). The share of credit it provided to agricultural projects grew during the 1960s, not least due to the so-called Green Revolution during which crop yields in Latin America and Asia signifcantly increased between the 1950s and 1970s and thus required major investments in irrigation, drainage, and other related services (Pincus 2001).

In 1964, the World Bank decided to work together with UN specialized agencies, and a deal was made that the FAO would prepare agricultural projects for World Bank lending (Shaw 2009, 114). The World Bank itself increased the number of staff in its agriculture department too (Shaw 2009). After an initial period of mainly providing loans for large infrastructure projects (roads, harbors, airports, dams), the World Bank's investment portfolio broadened from the mid-1960s, and agriculture became one of the main foci (Stryker 1979, 326–27), "designed to beneft 'the poorest 40 percent'" (Mkandawire 2010, 42). The IDA invested heavily in small farmers, supplying them with seed and fertilizer to foster cash crop production, which happened at the expense of the growth of local staple foods (Tetzlaff 2012, 266). Especially under the leadership of World Bank president McNamara (in offce from 1968–1981), small farm development was seen as crucial for combining growth with poverty reduction (Pincus 2001).

The "Green Revolution" gave rise to high hopes in technology and science for resolving the world's hunger problem. While progress in

<sup>1</sup> https://www.wfp.org/history. Accessed May 16, 2020.

natural sciences and technology had also been key for earlier agricultural revolutions (see Mingay 1977 on the UK), this marked the frst large-scale and global "diffusion" of agricultural knowledge, such as that on highyielding crop varieties. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were at the forefront of developing an international agricultural research program, beginning with research on rice and wheat improvements (Hazell 2009, 1). Even though many of the technological solutions of the time were not appropriate for smallholder production (Harwood 2009), the "Green Revolution" was perceived as a success story of science, thereby laying the foundations for the signifcant role that global research organizations would come to play in food policy. Besides the two foundations, there was also the FAO, the UNDP, and the World Bank that began to lobby for donors to invest more funds into agricultural research (Shaw 2009, 66). This led to the creation of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 1971, an umbrella body for research institutes that was initially tasked with studying possibilities of increasing output in staple foods (Shaw 2009, 66, 88, 154). The FAO, however, only reluctantly became a co-sponsor of CGIAR, as it meant giving away the lead it had in providing agricultural research by doing so (Shaw 2009, 96).

#### *The 1970s: High Time for Food Security*

In the early 1970s, the world's worst food crisis "in modern history" (Shaw 2010, 664), which included famines in the Sahel, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia (Devereux 2000, 6), led the FAO to propose an international initiative for world food security and for setting up an early warning system (Phillips 1981, 74). At this time, the FAO was roughly half fnanced through the UNDP and half fnanced through extra-budgetary sources like trust funds (earmarked funds from donors for specifc countries) (Phillips 1981). In 1974, a World Food Conference (WFC) was convened in Rome, though not on the FAO's premises (Shaw 2009, 96). Nonetheless, it still organized much of the program and managed to gain political support for many of its proposed activities. These included setting up a Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) and strengthening its work on pesticides, seeds, plant and animal diseases, nutrition, extension, research, and training (Phillips 1981, 75). One of the goals defned at the WFC was the eradication of hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity within a span of ten years (Martha 2009, 451). In the subsequent years, member governments agreed to increase the FAO's budget, though simultaneously suggested that it divert some of its resources away from headquarters (which was perceived to be overstaffed) into country offces (Phillips 1981, 75). After a review, some areas of the FAO's work were scaled down, including activities related to economic policies and world agricultural development, while the new short-term Technical Cooperation Program was initiated (Phillips 1981).

The 1974 conference also led to the establishment of various new institutional bodies. One of them was the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), an intergovernmental committee within the FAO tasked with serving as a forum for reviewing and following up on the decisions made at the conference (CFS 2015, 1). Another one was the shorter-lived World Food Council. Created in 1974, it was meant to function as "a political overview body and was to serve as the eyes, ears, and conscience of the UN system regarding world food security issues" (Shaw 2010, 664). Its coordination mandate allowed the president of the WFC to attend meetings of the governing bodies of the relevant UN agencies, in addition to holding meetings with their executive heads individually and collectively (Shaw 2010, 676). However, while given huge responsibilities, the WFC never received enough resources or authority and was dissolved in 1993 (Shaw 2010, 690).

Finally, a new international fnancial institution was created in 1977 following the recognition during the 1974 conference that investments in food and agricultural production needed to be signifcantly increased (Martha 2009, 451). The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was to be funded by voluntary contributions, a large share of which was to come from OPEC countries. It initially focused on funding food production in the poorest developing countries (Martha 2009, 453), and later diversifed into other areas, such as rural fnance, fsheries and livestock, irrigation, and rural poverty reduction more generally (Shaw 2009, 143–45). As contributions remained behind commitments, IFAD became a small provider of grants and loans when compared to the World Bank and regional development banks (Shaw 2009, 63, 87).2 Nonetheless, it is the only IFI that has the mandate to invest its resources exclusively into agriculture in developing countries (Martha 2009: 457).

Throughout this period, the relative weight of the World Bank grew. Against an overall rise in World Bank lending and a growing number of World Bank staff, the increase in the share of agriculture in its lending

<sup>2</sup> https://www.ifad.org/en/history. Accessed May 16, 2020.

portfolio from 18 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 1981 was considerable (Pincus 2001). By the late 1970s, the World Bank had become the most powerful international fnancial institution for development (Stryker 1979, 325), and debt owed by countries in the Global South started to accumulate (Tetzlaff 2012, 266). Apart from being the largest lender, the World Bank also began to dominate in terms of defning global development paradigms, based on the expertise of its economists from around the world (Tetzlaff 2012, 262–63). As a "knowledge bank", it has since had signifcant infuence on the global development discourse (Van Waeyenberge and Fine 2011). It further increased its infuence over CGIAR by increasing its funding and by persuading the CGIAR members to accept that their chairperson would be the vice-president of the World Bank (Shaw 2009, 114–15). Meanwhile, the FAO declined in relative importance and power (Unger 2019, 456).

The 1960s and 1970s were marked by governmental support for agriculture in the Global South. As in industrialized countries in the past, the strategies employed by states included land reforms, the provision of inputs and extension, national marketing agencies, governmental price setting, and stockpile management (Chang 2009). By taking account of and countering smallholder vulnerability, these could be classified as social protection policies (Devereux 2009, 6). While the FAO was supportive of such measures, it could not prevent them from becoming discredited during the neoliberal era of structural adjustment and agricultural liberalization.

#### *Neoliberal Shifts*

In the 1980s, after a short period of prioritizing rural poverty reduction, the World Bank shifted instead to concentrating on "eliminating all obstacles to a 'perfect market' as the presumed optimal path to growth" (Van Waeyenberge et al. 2011, 6). The bundle of neoliberal economic policy prescriptions commonly summarized as the "Washington Consensus" included the removal of subsidies, the deregulation and liberalization of trade, and the elimination of parastatal agencies (Oya 2004, 129). The national food security policies referred to above fell victim to these reforms, being perceived as largely ineffcient and too costly. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank's "Berg Report", published in 1981, found that domestic pricing policies had been biased against agriculture, disrupted market mechanisms, and crowded out the private sector (World Bank 1981; Loxley 1983; Devereux 2009, 6). The FAO underwent a policy shift too: from approaching food security at the national level (thus promoting grain-stockholding and self-suffciency) to defning it at the individual and household level (for which imports were deemed more effcient) (Jarosz 2011). How and why this shift within the FAO occurred would merit further scrutiny.

During the 1980s, the World Bank provided so-called agricultural sectoral adjustment loans (ASALs) to countries of the Global South that were linked to the elimination of subsidies and the liberalization of prices for agricultural inputs and outputs (Pincus 2001). The envisaged solution was that by lifting price "distortions" imposed by the state, smallholders would be enabled to prosper freely (Oya 2004, 128). Having been identifed as the problem, governing elites were now circumvented by donors, who preferred working through NGOs (Mkandawire 2010, 42–44). Overall, the reforms effectively dismantled the capacities of states to promote social and economic well-being. Their reduced investment in public goods for the agricultural sector coupled with trade liberalization threatened the survival of many farmers (Chang 2009, 2). Moreover, the wide-reaching fnancial market deregulation that began in this period enabled speculations on food, which eventually became one of the main drivers of the food price crises of 2008 and 2011 (Sonkin 2020).

During the height of structural adjustment, food security was reconceptualized. While it was still a concern to IOs in this period, it was largely decoupled from the production of food. As agricultural interventions by states had been discredited, structural adjustment reforms aiming at macroeconomic stability and economic growth were believed to ultimately also beneft poor people's ability to purchase food in the (globally connected) marketplace. According to the World Bank in the 1980s, the solution was "raising the real incomes of households so that they can afford to acquire enough food" (World Bank 1986, 5). Food security hence became mainly an issue of how to access it for consumption (Maxwell 2001, 24–25; Orford 2015, 6).

A critical juncture originated in the academic debate about famines. In 1981, Amartya Sen published his seminal work "Poverty and Famines" in which he pointed out that food crises were often not the outcome of insuffcient food availability, but of insuffcient access to food (Sen 1981). He suggested the framework of entitlements to make the case for paying more attention to individuals' and households' unequally distributed ability to access food, either through one's own production, by purchasing it from labor investment, or through food assistance (Sen; Devereux 2000, 19). With his intervention, Sen aimed to counter what had been received wisdom until then, including within the FAO: that food security was mainly a supply-side issue. Instead, he argued, one also needed to consider the inequalities and political dynamics within countries that accounted for people suffering from famines even in cases where food was available. While constituting an important intervention into an apolitical, technical discourse about food security, this work was simultaneously compatible with the interpretation that food security was achievable through a reduction of poverty and improved access to markets for the poor (Devereux 2000, 20).

As access to food became a priority in the World Bank's food policy discourse, its lending to agriculture decreased. In its infuential 1986 report entitled "Poverty and Hunger", the World Bank cited Sen's 1981 work to make the point that "[…] the loss of real income better explains why famines occur and who gets hurt" (World Bank 1986, 27). The focus in the international discourse shifted from supply to demand, and "entitlement, vulnerability and risk became the new watchwords" (Maxwell and Slater 2003, 532). It was only another four years until the World Bank began to promote targeted safety nets, perfecting an individualized perspective on poverty (World Bank 1990). The share of the World Bank's lending to agriculture dropped from 30 percent in the early 1980s to around 8 percent by the end of the millennium (Shaw 2009, 115).3 The resulting gap in lending to agriculture could not be compensated by IFAD, either, which had limited resources at its disposal (Martha 2009, 459).

The subordination of food security under the free trade paradigm was reinforced in 1995 by the formation of the WTO. Having previously been excluded from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), agriculture became part of the agreement for the frst time (FAO 1998). More than just regulating the international system, domestic policies also became the target of the rules due to their infuence on trade (FAO 1998). While the arguments underlying these agreements were similar to those of the structural adjustment reforms, the WTO had longer-lasting effects on governments' ability to foster production by permanently enshrining rules

<sup>3</sup>The World Bank explains the decline with reference to the falling proftability of agriculture, the increased competition for aid from other sectors, and the opposition from developed country farmers as well as environmental groups (World Bank 2007, 42).

about what types of interventions were permitted and which were not (FAO 1998; Margulis 2017, 50–51).

The FAO, meanwhile, reaffrmed food security and fghting hunger as their top priorities (Shaw 2009, 103). Because the long-term social effects of structural adjustment measures had proven disastrous for many countries in the Global South and had hit poorer farmers particularly hard (Oya 2004, 129–30), the awareness of poverty, undernourishment, and food insecurity began to rise again during the 1990s. A Summit on World Food Security was called by the FAO with the aim to renew international commitments.4 The Summit took place in November 1996 and a target was set to halve the number of people who were undernourished by 2015, measured against the year 1990 (Devereux 2018a, 185). The defnition of food security cited in the introduction of this chapter was also born at that summit, and has since become widely accepted (Margulis 2017, 29–30).

# IOs and Food Policy Since the Turn of the New Millennium

#### *Consensus and Critique*

In 2003, Maxwell and Slater nostalgically asked: "Remember 'food policy'? It is what some of us used to do before we discovered 'food security'" (Maxwell and Slater 2003, 531). Food security has become the core concept and rallying point in international food policy discourse. The above historical account shows how food security has evolved into a central, yet unsuccessfully resolved global problem. This section is concerned with the period since the turn of the new millennium. Architecturally, there has emerged an apparent consensus among the main international organizations that has culminated in two sets of developmental goals. Shortly following the 1996 World Food Summit, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted, in which goal number one was to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger", or more precisely, to "halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger".5 And in the SDGs that replaced the MDGs in 2015, goal number two was to "end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote

<sup>4</sup> http://www.fao.org/wfs/index\_en.htm. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>5</sup> https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml. Accessed May 16, 2020.

sustainable agriculture".6 Both have contributed to a common framework for international organizations working in food (Devereux 2018a, 185), including the FAO, the WFP, and the World Bank.7

Especially since 2008, global food policy initiatives have proliferated, and several international organizations have forged connections within this feld (Fouilleux et al. 2017, 1660). Since 2017, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have joined the FAO, the WFP, and IFAD in publishing their annual fagship publication "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World", which serves to monitor the progress made on SDG number two (FAO et al. 2019, xvi). As a new body, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) was launched in 2010 by the G20, as a "global partnership" for channeling donor funds (from rich countries and the Gates Foundation) to "public and private actors along the entire agriculture value chain".8 It is administered by the World Bank (FAO et al. 2019, 1665) and its steering committee includes not only representatives of international organizations but also a few civil society groups.9 Since the 1996 World Food Summit, advocacy for recognizing the right to food has also brought the global human rights regime into the picture (Margulis 2013, 58). The capacities of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Human Rights Council to monitor and enforce the human right to food have been strengthened (Margulis 2013, 59). The FAO adopted voluntary "right to food" guidelines in 200410 and since then, has made efforts to mainstream a rights-based approach into its food agenda, albeit with varying success (Anthes and De Schutter 2017). Last, the space occupied by the WFP in the new millennium is unclear owing to the dual nature of its mandate, which has been found to be perceived as somewhat confusing (MOPAN 2013). While its budget is several

<sup>6</sup> https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>7</sup> http://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals/en/; https://www.wfp.org/zerohunger; https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sdgs-2030-agenda, all accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>8</sup> https://www.gafspfund.org/approach. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>9</sup> https://www.gafspfund.org/civil-society-organizations. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>10</sup>Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security, adopted by the 127th Session of the FAO Council, 22–27 November 2004, see http://www.fao.org/3/j3893e/J3893e02.htm#ad. Accessed May 16, 2020.

times higher than that of the FAO,11 its emergency logistics skills have at times made a larger impression than its developmental food policy visions (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2018, 31; Maxwell 2008).

As international organizations have failed to resolve the problem of global hunger while continuously reconstructing a hopeful narrative (Hickel 2017), the emergence of powerful civil society actors has brought important dimensions of the global food question back to the table (Duncan 2016). A well-known one is La Via Campesina, an umbrella movement of peasants and smallholders from around the world, that was founded in 1993 to connect struggles for farmers' sovereignty over land, seeds, agricultural practices, and food (Borras Jr 2008; Borras et al. 2015).12 La Via Campesina has engaged with the FAO, which is interested in collaborative policy development and knowledge sharing (Claeys and Edelman 2020, 1).13 One recent success of civil society has been the adoption by the United Nations of the "Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas" in 2018 (Claeys and Edelman 2020); another one was the institutionalization of civil society participation in the Committee on World Food Security, whose secretariat is hosted by the FAO, in 2009 (Duncan and Barling 2012; Duncan 2016, 150). 14

An important critic of the global trade system and its effects on food security was Olivier De Schutter, who served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2008 until 2014 (McMichael 2014, 939; Orford 2015, 7). He highlighted that foreign imports outcompeted local production and destroyed agricultural capacities in the Global South, and criticized the WTO for rendering domestic food reserves, the management of prices, and the cushioning of income volatility for the rural poor impossible (De Schutter 2011). He also advocated for better regulations of largescale land acquisitions and for obliging investors to operate in the interest of local peasants (McMichael 2014, 939). Last, when the WTO proposed to regulate the types of permissible food aid, the WFP intervened and launched a public media campaign against the WTO (Margulis 2013, 61).

<sup>11</sup>WFP had raised 7.2 billion USD in 2018 (https://www.wfp.org/overview), while the total FAO budget planned for 2018–2019 was 2.6 billion USD (http://www.fao.org/ about/how-we-work/en/, both accessed May 16, 2020).

<sup>12</sup> https://viacampesina.org/en/food-sovereignty/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>13</sup> http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/201824/icode/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>14</sup> http://www.fao.org/cfs/home/about/en/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

But while the UN organizations have much normative and moral authority, the WTO ultimately makes the rules (Margulis 2013, 63).

#### *Production*

In the new millennium, food production is back on the agenda. As was described above, the focus had shifted since the early 1980s from questions of production to questions of distribution and access. For several reasons, the new millennium has seen a return to the concern of how to produce more food. Devereux calls this the "new productivist agenda" (Devereux 2018a). Given the accelerating effects of climate change, this agenda is inevitably linked to the question of how to make food production not only more yielding but also more "sustainable".

Especially in Africa, agricultural productivity has not substantially increased over the past 50 years so that the continent falls short of feeding itself (Devereux 2018a, 186–88). In light of global population growth, the imperative that results is commonly referred to as the "challenge of feeding 9 billion people" (Godfray et al. 2010). In 2009, the FAO wrote that food production needed to be doubled "[…] in order to feed a population projected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050" (FAO 2009, vi), and the World Bank even estimates that a 70 percent increase in food will be required.15 While the need to increase the overall amount of available food worldwide is highly disputed (Fouilleux et al. 2017), as the current amount could be suffcient if only it were better distributed,16 the "productivist agenda" has brought the important question of supporting smallholder agriculture back into focus.

One of the frst signals of this move was the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report (WDR), entitled "Agriculture for Development" (World Bank 2007). The topic of that year's WDR surprised the development community, given that the World Bank had not paid much attention to agriculture since the 1980s, as indicated above. In fact, except for IFAD, all international fnancial institutions had reduced their relative share of lending to agriculture during the 1990s (Martha 2009, 458). In the report, the World Bank itself recognized that donor neglect had

<sup>15</sup> https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climate-smart-agriculture. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>16</sup> https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/world-food-day-there-enough-foodgrown-world-everyone-op-ed. Accessed May 16, 2020.

contributed to an underinvestment in agriculture in the Global South (World Bank 2007, 44).

The report was seen as a welcome move back toward the unresolved issue of how to foster smallholder production, but criticisms mounted too. The main thrust of the WDR 2008 remained the focus on market-led agricultural development in which the "new role for the state" would consist of "providing core public goods, improving the investment climate for the private sector—and in better natural resources management by introducing incentives and assigning property rights" (World Bank 2007, 24). Such interventions, however, did not promise to resolve the problems created by dismantling states' ability to promote their own agricultural sectors in the Global South, and critics interpreted it as "an ongoing adherence to orthodoxy" (Akram-Lodhi 2008, 1155). Moreover, while paying lip service to peasants, the report failed to resolve the problems they faced in having to operate in a detrimental environment shaped by big agribusinesses and corporate power (Oya 2009, 595).

Raising agricultural productivity and production without further damaging the environment and climate is a widely shared concern. As one solution, the FAO and World Bank encourage techniques of conservation agriculture (World Bank 2012).17 The FAO additionally supports agroecology (FAO 2018) and organic farming (Morgera et al. 2012, v). For its part, the World Bank has promoted "climate-smart agriculture" since 2009, which combines the aims of productivity increase, reduction of vulnerability to climate change, and reduction of emissions (i.e., productivity, adaptation, and mitigation).18 Critics, however, have argued that this concept remains vague enough for the agricultural "business as usual" to continue (Taylor 2018). Research plays an important role in reaching the vision of a "food system simultaneously capable of delivering greater volumes of more nutritious food with a lower environmental footprint".19 International agricultural think tanks have once again gained in importance, not least because state research agencies have suffered in the structural adjustment period (Chang 2009, 14).

While critics point to the confict between free trade and peasant production, a popular attempt at reconciling both is the reliance on global value chains. According to the World Bank, increasing private sector

<sup>17</sup> http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture/en/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>18</sup> https://csa.guide/csa/what-is-climate-smart-agriculture. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>19</sup> https://www.cgiar.org/research/research-themes/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

investment in agricultural value chains will contribute to ending poverty and hunger (World Bank 2018). Whether smallholders can beneft from being part of agricultural value chains, however, remains far from clear (Joala et al. 2016). From a very different vantage point, though also aimed at connecting smallholders to markets, farming cooperatives have been rediscovered. Historically, the cooperative movement has been a powerful way of enabling smallholders to beneft from economies of scale while simultaneously serving as a collective body for interest representation and risk pooling (Wanyama et al. 2009). After having suffered considerably from the structural adjustment reforms (Wanyama et al. 2009), cooperatives are now being promoted again, most prominently by the ILO. In 2002, the ILO adopted its Promotion of Cooperatives Recommendation (No. 193) as a guide to governments for revising their cooperative laws and putting supportive policies in place (ILO 2014, xv). The ILO sees cooperatives as having the potential to offer their members decent jobs, better access to global, regional, and national (agricultural) markets, access to fnance, infrastructure, and irrigation, as well as social security (ILO 2014; Pollet 2009).

#### *Protection*

A whole architecture of its own has been constructed from arguments about the (potential) linkages between social protection and food security. The new millennium has seen a wave of new social protection policies across the Global South. They are aimed at providing income security in times of risk during different stages of the life cycle and include social assistance programs (like cash transfers) and social insurance schemes (like unemployment benefts) (ILO 2017, xxix). Many international organizations are promoting the social protection agenda, though from very different conceptual and political angles (for an overview, see UNICEF 2019, 63–68). In 2012, the High-Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security produced a report arguing that rights-based social protection could further the realization of the right to food (HLPE 2012, 11). Social protection can play several key roles in relation to food, not only in terms of its consumption but also in terms of its production (HLPE 2012; Devereux 2009).

An obvious way for social protection to contribute to food security is through social transfers, in kind or in cash. They can enable the poor to afford adequate food, and they can smoothen seasonal income fuctuations, especially for subsistence farmers. In many countries, smallholders depend on rainfed agriculture and have—depending on the rain pattern in their region—only one harvest season per year. This leads to insuffcient access to income or food throughout several months of the lean season (Devereux and Tavener-Smith 2019). Social transfers can prevent harmful coping strategies such as reducing food intake or the sale of assets (Devereux and Tavener-Smith 2019).

By raising household incomes, social protection can improve nutrition through making more diverse foods available. Besides the ILO,20 UNICEF is one of the leading international organizations that promote rights-based universal social protection, and produced its frst "Social Protection Strategic Framework" in 2012 (UNICEF 2019, 1). UNICEF recognizes the positive impact that social protection can have on the nutrition of children, as a "good consumption and diet diversifcation [are] a major focus of expenditure when families living in poverty receive cash transfers" (UNICEF 2019, 29). But they also point out that additional concerted interventions are needed to address undernutrition effectively (UNICEF 2019; see also Devereux 2018a, 194). UNICEF engages in programs aimed at improving the nutrition of mothers, pregnant women, children, and adolescents and includes, for instance, breastfeeding campaigns or the supplementation of micronutrients.21 For its part, the WFP connects nutrition, agricultural development, and social protection by sourcing "home-grown" food for school meals, thereby improving educational outcomes while also offering an additional market to local smallholders.22

Social protection can also have productive effects. Especially for smallholders, overcoming fnancing constraints is a key step toward increasing production; yet, the private credit facilities that were supposed to replace the former state-led ones have failed to meet this need (Chang 2009, 18–19). Cash transfers are thus a useful support for farmers to invest in agricultural inputs and assets, such as seed, fertilizer, implements, or the use of processing facilities. In 2003, social protection was stipulated as a

<sup>20</sup> https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/social-security/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed May 16, 2020. While the ILO's Social Protection Floors, adopted in 2012, are a key step in building rights-based social protection systems, they do not dwell on issues of nutrition (Devereux 2018b).

<sup>21</sup> https://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index\_action.html. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>22</sup> https://www.wfp.org/home-grown-school-meals. Accessed May 16, 2020. This differs from USAID, for instance, which sources US food for its food aid.

"corporate priority" by the FAO and is increasingly integrated into its assistance missions (FAO 2017, 1). It aims to expand social protection to rural people, to forge synergies between social protection and agriculture, to make agriculture nutrition-sensitive, and to use social protection for agricultural resilience (FAO 2017). Under its "From Protection to Production Project", the FAO, in collaboration with UNICEF, evaluates the productive effects of cash transfer programs.23 Other social protection schemes include insurance mechanisms that protect smallholders against droughts or crop failure (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2018, 6), and supporting rural organizations that can collectivize risks (FAO 2017).

In sum, the current social protection momentum offers a much-needed opportunity to bring back those agricultural policies that were previously dismantled during the neoliberal era.

#### Conclusion

Ensuring that all people across the world have access to food remains an unresolved problem. Despite many decades of investments by international organizations, the number of those living with hunger or undernourishment is on the rise, and the productive capacities of farmers in the Global South remain severely incapacitated. While the formal international architecture around food has failed to address the major underlying structural problems, a growing number of civil society and peasant movements pose vital questions about the current global capitalist order, thereby re-politicizing what has largely become a deceptively peaceful mishmash of micro debates. Not least thanks to the current attention to rights-based social protection, several public interventions that could potentially remedy some of the negative consequences of the neoliberal reforms have been rediscovered. The end of the lean season of global food policies might thus be in sight. But whether this momentum is utilized will also depend on the political power and effectiveness of organizations that could challenge the neoliberal paradigm, which has been successfully "embedded" (Duncan 2016) by the World Bank and the WTO.

As Orford has pointed out, the fact that making sure people have enough to eat has become a task for international organizations, who act

<sup>23</sup> http://www.fao.org/economic/ptop/home/en/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

"on behalf of humanity as a whole" is in itself remarkable (Orford 2015, 9). After all, food production and consumption are fundamentally local activities. Solving the problem of their equitable distribution might need to start from there.

#### References


World Bank. 1986. "Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries." Washington D.C.

World Bank. 1990. "World Development Report 1990: Poverty." Washington D.C.


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# Conclusion

# International Organizations and the Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance

*Kerstin Martens, Dennis Niemann, and Alexandra Kaasch*

This book has dealt with the initiatives, ideas, and policy preferences of International Organizations (IOs) in different felds of global social policy. The chapters have focused on felds within the broader areas of labor and

This chapter is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

K. Martens (\*) • D. Niemann

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail: martensk@uni-bremen.de; dniemann@uni-bremen.de

A. Kaasch

© The Author(s) 2021 325

Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: alexandra.kaasch@uni-bielefeld.de

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_14

migration, family and education, and health and environment. Each contribution has provided specifc accounts of actor constellations, ideational content, and resulting characterizations of global social policy architectures. In this fnal chapter, we aim to bring together in a systematic manner the insights from these various social policy felds in order to generalize about populations of IOs, ideas and discourses, and patterns of global governance in social policies.

Naturally, most of the chapters in the volume acknowledge that the felds being looked at are driven by many different global actors, with IOs being just one, albeit a central one. None of the chapters nor this conclusion suggest that IOs are always the most important or most powerful actors. Nevertheless, they can be considered the most multi-faceted type of actor, in particular due to their multiple and varying roles, functions, and mechanisms of impact. By IOs we refer to intergovernmental organizations which have their own organizational bodies (e.g. secretariats) and have states as their prime members. Other types of organizations (e.g. bi- or multilateral associations of international exchange or international non-governmental organizations) are mentioned and discussed in relation to and within the context of IOs. In conceptualizing global social governance within social felds, we were interested in mapping each feld according to the IOs active in it and analyzing the discourses they promote. The analytical approaches of organizational ecology and of soft governance within the study of IR were loosely applied in this volume as heuristic frames and offered a theoretical lens for assessing the developments in the social policy felds. First, each chapter in this book shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs, namely how a feld is constituted as well as which are the major or regional IOs. Second, each chapter examined the *discourses* within and between the IOs of a respective feld, presenting the major leitmotifs and policies found in a feld. Overall, the chapters described and analyzed what we call the *architecture of arguments* in global social governance.

This concluding chapter resumes the arguments made in the introduction to this volume. We highlight prevailing cross-cutting issues and themes by summarizing fndings pertinent to the different questions we raised in the introduction: How is the feld of IOs in global social governance constituted? How can the discourses of IOs in social policy felds be described? How is the constellation of IOs interlinked with what they address? IOs have actively shaped the architecture of arguments in global social governance for a long time: They have populated diverse social felds and exercised soft governance, shaping how the global discourse on social policy topics is organized through the cognitive authority they hold over their specifc feld. While the dynamics within populations tend to be characterized by cooperation and coexistence, looking at the discourses and ideas promoted in social policy reveals contestation between IOs. This chapter closes by formulating avenues for further research.

#### IO Populations in Global Social Policies

The previous chapters mapped the population of IOs in a given social policy feld by assessing the organizational felds in the realm of social policy. They showed which actors were pivotal and how the composition of IOs dealing with a certain policy evolved. Some IOs appear in almost all social policy felds. This group of almost omnipresent IOs includes the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank in particular, and increasingly also the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to a certain extent. Therefore, these three IOs can be considered as general global social policy actors, working across a signifcant variety and number of specifc social policy areas. This is not fundamentally new or surprising. Studies from as early as the 1990s onward have placed the ILO and the World Bank at the center of explaining global social policies and governance (Deacon 2007; Deacon et al. 1997). Equally signifcant in more recent years has been the OECD, which made notable contributions to the feld and is considered a key global social policy actor (see also Deeming and Smyth 2018; Deacon and Kaasch 2008; Kaasch 2010; Ervik 2009; Mahon 2009). This observation holds true even for most of the policy felds that have barely been addressed by the global social policy literature before.

Also in line with earlier works (Deacon et al. 1997), all chapters have shown how the UN system is a structural determinant of global social policy felds. Particularly the overarching Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as global initiatives on the UN level, are mechanisms that bring IO actors together in their commitments to achieve common goals. That has been specifcally mentioned in several chapters, for example, by *Lakeman* on climate change or by *Wolkenhauer* on food.

With regard to single IOs, the oldest one is also one of the most signifcant and visible organizations in social policy: the ILO. Mandated with labor market and social protection issues and uniquely comprised in a tripartite manner of governments, employers, and workers, the ILO appears as a key player in any global social policy feld. In many of the chapters, the story repeats itself: the World Bank appeared on the scene in the 1990s, challenging the ILO (and other UN agencies) and taking on quite a powerful role from that point on (apart from Deacon's work; Koivusalo and Ollila 1997 made such an argument for the feld of health; Mundy and Verger 2015 for education). Similarly, the OECD emerged as an infuential actor in social policy. While this IO is signifcantly different due to it having a limited number of member states and therefore a rather indirect impact on most countries of the world, its ideational and discursive power has also challenged UN specialized agencies (see, e.g. some of the contributions in Mahon and McBride 2008).

Several major and globally acting IOs, like the ILO, the World Bank, and the OECD, successively expanded their social policy portfolios and populated niches which were previously not occupied by IOs. This, among other things, resulted in what Deacon (2007) had called 'overlapping' and 'competing' institutions in the shorter term. In the longer term, however, much of this has turned into collaborative relationships under joint goals or initiatives. In this way, as within the UN system particularly, the ILO and the World Bank were able to take leading positions in wider initiatives, keep powerful positions over extended time periods—even when faced with more IOs as actors in the feld—and set the tone for as well as play a dominant role in shaping the global discourse. This can be seen, for example, in the context of the Social Protection Floor initiative, as mentioned by *Heneghan* and *Kaasch*.

Such fndings help us to specify the meaning of 'populations' as the dominant IOs active in specifc social policy felds, but potentially also for global social policy and governance in general. We can identify several patterns of how such felds are constituted and have developed over time. The fundamental distinction works along two dimensions: frst, density and diversity focus on how many and what kind of IOs are active in a policy feld. The concepts of density and diversity also address whether certain IOs have occupied particular niches within a policy feld. Second, the interaction and relationship of the involved (IO) actors in a feld can be characterized by either cooperation or contestation. Interaction and relationship also refer to the communication between IOs within a population as well as how IOs interact with the organizational environment of states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other collective actors.

Prime examples of social policy felds which are densely populated by a diversity of IOs are education, as shown by *Niemann and Martens,* as well as the social policy dimensions of climate change, as elaborated by *Lakeman*. In both felds, we fnd a high number of IOs actively promoting their views and ideas. However, both felds also vary: while many of the IOs active in education are either distinct 'education' IOs or have been dealing with education as part of their mandate for a long time, climate change and its social dimension is a feld which almost no IO seems to deny, and even IOs that have a distinctive thematic background and usually do not deal with matters of climate change have contributed to the discourse. In contrast, other felds are covered by a few specialized global IOs. Youth employment, as explored by *Fergusson,* is a policy feld that is focused on a specifc group and a specifc labor market issue. With this example, we also see how global social policy studies are increasingly being organized into sub-felds. Their historical development is usually much shorter and the number of actors smaller—the ILO and World Bank commonly being the key players. According to *Heneghan*, both organizations have also largely shaped the global discourse on pension reform, although at different times and accompanied by a few UN organizations, the OECD, and the European Union (EU). In the case of children and their rights, *Holzscheiter* has argued that the centrality of the UN system and related organizations has become prevalent.

An important new fnding for global social governance more generally that can be taken from the collection of chapters in this book is the signifcance of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Although its focus is on education, science, and culture, UNESCO has been identifed as an infuential IO in various chapters. Besides being active in its core competency areas, UNESCO has also covered care and migration policies, disability, and even water issues. In fact, UNESCO was the frst agency to deal with international health worker migration as an issue of global concern, as highlighted by *Yeates and Pillinger*. In the case of disability, *Schuster and Kolleck* underlined that UNESCO became a strong and active supporter of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopting its own action plan for supporting persons with disabilities. Since its inception, UNESCO was involved in water politics, including the launch of UNESCO's International Hydrological Decade, as *Schmidt* demonstrated. Similarly, *Fergusson* elaborated that UNESCO has always been concerned with questions of youth (un)employment and has shaped the discourse in favor of raising the school leaving age. In light of its name and mandate, UNESCO has obviously been an important IO in the realm of education since its inception, although it is neither the only IO within the UN system nor the only education IO, as demonstrated by *Niemann and Martens*.

The relationship between IOs within a policy feld also differs signifcantly. On a continuum, this could range from cut-throat competition at the one pole to cordial cooperation on the other. However, in the case of social policy, we generally fnd that the typical contestations described for global social policies in the 1990s (Deacon et al. 1997) have not remained stable. Now, patterns of cooperation prevail over contestation in many global social policy felds. Even if IOs with very different worldviews and organizational backgrounds interact, like the OECD and the ILO for example, they still manage to agree on some common ground and do not escalate their diverging policy positions into permanent confict. Two major causes for this development can be identifed in the various case studies: global crisis and common (development) goals. For example, *Mahon* described in her chapter how after the global economic and fnancial crisis in 2008, the three major IOs in the realm of family policies—the ILO, the OECD, and the World Bank—embraced the concepts and language of inclusive growth and recognized women's unequal share of unpaid domestic work. As concerns the feld of international health care workers, *Yeates and Pillinger* showed that the International Platform on Health Worker Mobility presents a recent example of cooperation between the ILO, the OECD, and WHO. This also mirrors the way in which the feld of international health care workers is scattered across a variety of IOs which each look at it through a specifc lens. According to *Fergusson*, the feld of youth (un)employment is similarly characterized by recent IO partnerships, in which foremost the ILO and the World Bank collectively interpreted youth unemployment. It is too early to predict patterns of change or new structures in global social governance as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. However, the chapter by *Kaasch* identifed some signs that at least global health governance might revert back to more individualized IO approaches. The role of the MDGs, SDGs, and other global initiatives, such as the Universal Health Coverage approach described in the chapter by *Kaasch* or the social protection foor initiative referred to in *Heneghan's* chapter, provides incentives to collaborate rather than to compete. Being part of such initiatives, not to mention heading specifc gatherings or joint institutions, provides important leverage in related discourses.

Most of the IOs which were identifed as dominant in social policies are global IOs. This means that their activities are not restricted to a particular region or set of countries. Usually, these global IOs are the 'big players'. However, in some social policy felds, regional IOs were also important and thus occupied their own particular niche. This has become particularly evident in the feld of education, in which many IOs have a regional scope, as *Niemann and Martens* have shown. Despite the dominance of the UN system in the feld of disability, regional approaches are now also visible. For example, *Schuster and Kolleck* demonstrated that the EU has a disability strategy and a focus on collecting information and data on the implementation status of the CRPD in member states. On the African continent and in the Southeast Asian region, IOs promoted and adopted additional instruments to mainstream the rights of people with disabilities. In the case of labor standards, *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* argued that regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), are better at coming to agreements and overcoming deadlocks since they represent more homogeneous groups of countries.

In addition, the feld an IO is active in is also populated by other actors. Although other actors were not the focus of attention in our volume, it was impossible in some felds to describe the population of IOs without reference to other players, since their interconnection is deeply intertwined. The feld of disability, as shown by *Schuster and Kolleck,* is a prime example, whereby the nexus between civil society actors and IOs is particularly strong in promoting and implementing the CRPD. The feld of youth (un)employment, as explored by *Fergusson,* is characterized by partnerships between IOs, national governments, and also through partnershipbased entrepreneurial solutions. Similarly, in the feld of labor standards, *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* showed that the implementation and enforcement of standards are deeply supported by a variety of actors, including multi-stakeholder initiatives, international unions, NGOs, and also grassroots movements. Furthermore, *Holzscheiter* argued that starting from the 1990s, the feld of children's rights became densely populated by non-governmental, hybrid, and public-private partnership organizations as well as networks which all interact with each other. For education, *Niemann and Martens* reminded us that despite there being 30 IOs active in the feld, some NGOs and think tanks can be more infuential through their fnancial means than many of the education IOs with little budgets.

#### Discourses IOs Spread about Social Policy Issues

As has been shown, all analyzed social policy felds are populated by several IOs. These IOs do not necessarily hold the same preferences or convictions regarding the best policy solutions or the most desirable policy aims. Hence, sometimes IOs discursively compete for who gets their ideas accepted (Béland and Orenstein 2013). In analyzing the cognitive authority of IOs within a given policy feld, it is important to take into account who is able to shape problem perceptions, goal defnitions, and appropriate means. Since this generally refects a soft governance approach, assessing how IOs disseminate their ideas within a discourse is crucial. Discourse dynamics (how framing in a social policy feld varied over time) and discourse coalitions (consensus or diverging ideas) are two concepts that have been addressed throughout this volume. While the frst aspect is tied to the changing nature of a global discourse in a social policy feld, the latter refers to cooperation among IOs when putting forward their ideational framework. To recall, the concept of 'discourse' in this volume refers to the strategic way in which the collective actor IOs frame ideas. Analyzing the discourses which IOs promote allows for insights into their policies and leitmotifs, which shape particular social policy felds, and a better understanding of how views on social policies have evolved over time.

The discourses IOs promote are not static but changing: they have different facets and scopes in different times and contexts. As *Heneghan* showed for the case of pensions, the discourses IOs spread are shaped by paradigm shifts about global economics. Moreover, certain discourses can be highly connected with specifc IOs. In the case of disability, as explored by *Schuster and Kolleck,* it is particularly striking that specifc preferences are strongly interlocked with the involved IOs: while a medical approach to disability is promoted by WHO and involves enhancing welfare policies to support and 'medically repair' disabled individuals, a sociopolitical or rights-based approach to disability policymaking is favored by the UN system and implies an adjustment of the physical environments of disabled persons to suit their needs. The OECD and the ILO instead favor an economic model of disability by focusing on building and ensuring inclusive structures in the labor market. In the realm of family issues, *Mahon* demonstrated that discourses promoted by IOs were bifurcated until the economic crisis of 2008 between the North and the South, whereby the North connected with IOs such as the ILO and the OECD and followed the shift they promoted from the male breadwinner to adult earner caregiver model, whereas the South employed the policies of UNICEF and the World Bank which primarily targeted the children of poor families. After 2008 and with the introduction of the SDGs, both world regions have come to be addressed in a common discourse of inclusive growth. In the case of water policies, we have learned from the chapter by *Schmidt* that IOs contributed to the discourse on water being changed from one where it was seen as a natural resource to one where it is framed as a social good.

In some cases, discourses have become harmonized and previous contestation has been replaced by collaboration and associated agreement over ideas. The chapter by *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* illustrated the tensions and disagreements that importantly characterize the discourse on a set of adequate global labor standards across institutions. In fact, between and even within IOs, there are different viewpoints based on conficting ideological beliefs on labor standards. In addition, there are also strong regional differences. The feld of pensions has typically been described as a feld of contestation of economic paradigms (neoliberal views vs. social investment), where IOs accordingly promote one or the other, as can be seen by the ILO's opposition to the neoliberal-leaning World Bank and OECD. The chapter by *Heneghan* told this same story too, but also provided evidence of global economic crises having an impact on economic thinking. Nowadays, the organizations collaborate under the roof of the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B), and the discourse over appropriate pension reform happens with the aim of interagency agreement on key terms, ideas, and recommendations.

For the feld of climate change and social policy, as dealt with in the chapter by *Lakeman,* the tensions between economic, environmental, and social goals are expected to lead to competing policy ideas and models. However, the feld as such is currently only just beginning to emerge, and the engagement of IOs is still more focused on issues of climate change and its impact on social well-being than on establishing comprehensive eco-social policies. As *Yeates and Pillinger* have argued, some contestation also prevails in the area of health worker migration, where fracture lines within the cooperative Global Skills Partnerships have emerged and where the essential health needs and social protection approaches of the ILO and WHO have been challenged by proponents of mobility, fnancial incentives, employability, and skills transfers by the OECD and the World Bank. For global health governance regarding health care systems, *Kaasch* showed that it is the level of abstraction that produces dynamics of consensus or contestation, respectively.

It also became apparent that the discourse in one social feld is often linked to the discourse in other felds of IO activity. For example, discussing disability rights is associated with preventing poverty and granting access to education for people with disabilities, as *Schuster and Kolleck* have shown. Similarly, children's rights also touch upon the topics of health, education, food security, and social benefts, according to *Holzscheiter*. In addition, social policy discourse can also be shaped by non-social policy issues: *Schmidt* pointed out that water policy discussed by IOs is also infuenced by knowledge from engineering and technological progress. Also, the discourse on development policies contributed to how water was framed as a social good. In sum, the interlinkage between discourses could lead to new evaluations, goal defnitions, or problem recognitions.

In several social policy felds, the authors have identifed a current dominant double-edged discourse in the nexus between economic issues and social rights. In this context, the preferences and leitmotifs of IOs vary and the purpose of a given social policy is defned differently. This does not mean that IOs with different world views are necessarily irreconcilable with each other. It rather means that (groups of) IOs pursue different aims that in turn shape the whole discourse within a social policy feld. In the case of care and migration, the dualism is refected in the availability of health workers on the one hand and the quality of provisions on the other hand, as *Yeates and Pillinger* have argued. The discourse on education revolves around the following two education purposes: a means to generate human capital or a social right to promote citizenship values. While some IOs like the OECD or the World Bank primarily focus on the former, the ILO and UNESCO place education as a citizenship right at the center of their approach, according to *Niemann and Martens*. *Fergusson* highlighted in his study on youth (un)employment that the right to quality (vocational) training is sometimes plotted against considerations of employability (options) in the job market. Finally, in the discourse on children's rights, *Holzscheiter* claimed that a traditional approach to serving children's special needs by providing (fnancial) assistance is contrasted with a more progressive approach of recognizing children's rights as human rights.

In addition, the analyses in this volume also show that IOs may have divergent interpretations of a given concept depending on their specifc angle. While food security in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been associated with securing its production and fghting hunger, the World Bank's solution to food security has lain in providing fnancial access for consumption. From the perspective of the World Trade Organization (WTO), food security has instead been seen as a function of open markets and trade, as demonstrated by *Wolkenhauer*. *Yeates and Pillinger* showed in the case of health worker migration that even though underpinning ideas were shared by relevant IOs, the ideas were taken up in quite different ways. While the ILO, WHO, and UNESCO all subscribe to the UN's normative principles on human rights and equality, each IO blends in different perspectives which in turn refect their specifc fundamental discourses on improving working conditions and social justice (ILO), meeting essential health needs (WHO), or of emigration of highly skilled health workers (UNESCO). As elaborated by *Holzscheiter*, sometimes different views of global IOs and regional organizations become apparent in the discourse. Children's rights, as formulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and interpreted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are challenged on the grounds of Western bias by regional human rights treaties and institutions, like the ASEAN Commission on the Rights of Women and Children which pays additional attention to a stronger cultural embedding of core principles and ideas codifed in the UNCRC.

## Linking the Constellation of IOs to the Discourses they Promote

In sum, IOs have been shaping global social governance not only since recent times but for a century. Most exceptionally, the ILO is the most prominent IO in this regard and across all felds, but especially the World Bank and the OECD are among the dominant players too. Thus, IOs with universal membership, like the UN and UN agencies, have been shaping global discourses with great intensity*.* Hence, it is safe to say that IOs have held cognitive authority in the realm of social policy for a long time, and states not only tolerated but also encouraged the delegation of social policy authority to the international level long before it was considered necessary due to globalization processes and growing international interdependencies. IOs often exercise soft governance as broadcasters of new ideas. What has become evident from the contributions in this volume is that the general approach of IOs does not differ in social felds: While an economistic view is applied by the World Bank, the OECD, and to some extent the ILO, the UN system and other IOs apply social or rights-based approaches.

The fact that IOs deal with social policy on a global scale, however, is no recent phenomenon. Although social policy is widely considered as a classical domain of the nation state, the internationalization of it began well before globalization. It even dates back to before World War II, and before many currently operational IOs were founded. As *Schmidt* reminded us, one of the frst multilateral international agreements, the founding treaty of the Danube Commission of 1856 on water issues, also addressed social policy issues in the broader sense. A very early form of protecting children's rights was established back in 1904 with the International Agreement for the Suppression of 'White Slave Traffc', according to *Holzscheiter*. In the feld of food policy, as we learned from the chapter by *Wolkenhauer*, the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) was founded in 1905 as a global mechanism for networking as well as for exchanging information and statistics. The ILO, recently celebrating its centenary anniversary, started its social policy program in 1919 with Convention 003 on Maternity Protection, as explored by *Mahon*, and the Minimum Age Convention on youth employment, as explored by *Fergusson*. In the subsequent decades, the ILO continued to aim for the introduction of social protection mechanisms, for instance with the Conventions 35 and 36, on old-age insurance in industry and agriculture.

However, intrinsic features of organizations may determine the kind of involvement an IO has as well as the nature of its discourse. Thus, in addition to the organizational environment, specifc features of an IO have shaped the kind of discourses they promote and their ability to respond to a changing environment. As seen in the case of pensions, dealt with by *Heneghan*, the World Bank and the ILO have their own distinct departments on the issue and enjoy having the autonomy to promote specifc pension models. Moreover, both organizations have the means to offer professional and technical assistance to reforming countries. Also, competition between sub-departments of single IOs infuences how a discourse is shaped. For example, the discourse on family policy within the OECD was changed by the adoption of the initiative 'New Approaches to Economic Challenges', which posed direct challenges to the ideas of the Economic Department by enhancing the centrality of the Directorate for Employment, Labor and Social Affairs' organizational discourse, as *Mahon* has shown.

Furthermore, intrinsic features of IOs may also infuence cognitive authority. For the case of labor standards, *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* have shown that unlike other IOs, the regulations passed by ASEAN remain non-binding with questionable impact due to the lack of regional harmonization. Since the OECD and the EU have a distinct membership, they are reluctant to promote one specifc pension model and therefore prefer to use benchmarking as cognitive authority to promote general principles. According to *Heneghan,* reputation and cognitive authority also play a role in pension politics, as the tripartite structure of the ILO promotes the emergence of consensus. In the case of education policy, the cognitive authority of the OECD stems in particular from its data analysis department. The OECD's emphasis on gathering and interpreting data on education performance through its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Study made the IO a central reference point for other IOs (and other stakeholders) in the discourse (Niemann and Martens 2018).

With this volume, our aim was to analyze global social governance as an *architecture of arguments* brought forward by the IOs active in various felds within the broader areas of labor and migration, family and education, and health and environment. The varying constellations of IOs in different social policy felds and their patterns of discourse that characterize global social policies have been explored. The volume brought forward interesting and new insights about IOs and their involvement in global social policies as summarized in this chapter. However, there are also many issues that remain:

First, we need to better understand additional policy felds that overlap with social policies. For example, trade, energy, or security policies would almost certainly reveal a social policy component. Hence, it is not the policy feld per se that makes it a social policy feld, but it is more a deliberate decision to perceive issues as a social policy.

Second, we could aim to fnd new ways to analyze patterns of collaboration and contestation by performing a more systematic analysis of felds and sub-felds in social policies. More concretely, characterizations of global labor market policies could be compared with and related to analyses of the sub-felds of labor market policies such as youth unemployment, migrant labor markets, and child labor; or analyses of different felds of global labor markets like the global food industry, the global carpets and rugs industry, and global care markets. There are already analyses of many such groups and felds, sometimes also addressing the role of IOs, but there is no systematic comparison between them as to what characterizes many or all sub-felds and what is specifc to a particular aspect of global labor markets.

Third, more theoretical questions would include considerations on whether different discourses are becoming more isomorphic. Delving deeper into such questions would result in a better conceptualization of the meaning of overlapping and merging policy felds, as opposed to current concepts of discourses becoming more similar. From there, we could further investigate the implications for actor constellations and inter-actor relationships, or more generally for global social governance architecture(s).

Fourth, more research into the types of IOs in global social governance, the ways in which they are dependent on (not just aware of or linked to) other global social policy actors, and the extent of this dependency is also important for understanding their roles, positions, and leeway for exerting infuence. A prominent example is the strong involvement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with WHO activities, because it regularly causes criticism from outside observers. Comparatively, we know much less about other IOs and their involvement with and dependency on other actors.

Fifth, any further contribution to global social governance will certainly have to take into account the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the roles, positions, abilities, and power of IOs. In the context of declining multilateralism, a process that was already in motion prior to the outbreak, the future of IOs like WHO and UNESCO is anything but certain. Particularly at risk is their 'global' signifcance, while fnancial institutions and knowledge actors like the OECD might be found to have a more stable position in the long term beyond the crisis.

#### References


*Social Policy. Ideas, Actors and Impacts*, edited by Rune Ervik, Nanna Kildal and Even Nilssen, 138-164. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Kaasch, Alexandra. 2010. "A New Global Health Actor? The OECD's Careful Guidance of National Health Care Systems." In *Mechanisms of OECD Governance – International Incentives for National Policy Making?*, edited by Kerstin Martens and Anja Jakobi, 180-197. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koivusalo, Meri, and Eeva Ollila. 1997. *Making a Healthy World*. Helsinki: Stakes.


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The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Index1

#### **A**

Academic Network of European Disability Experts (ANED), 215 Active labor market policies (ALMPs), 36, 46 African Development Bank (AfDB), 170, 175n3 African Risk Capacity (ARC), 266 African Union (AU), 170, 173, 215 Agenda 2030, 49, 151 Agricultural development, 301, 304, 312, 314 Agricultural policies, 299, 315 Agricultural sectoral adjustment loans (ASALs), 306 Alma-Ata Declaration, 245 Annan, Kof, 264 Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States (ABEGS), 170, 171 Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientifc Organization (ALECSO), 170, 171

ASEAN Commission on the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), 157, 159 ASEAN Formal Employment towards Decent Work Promotion, 69 ASEAN Guideline on Good Industrial Relations Practices, 68 ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), 68, 69 Asian Development Bank (ADB), 170, 173 Asian Financial Crisis, 119 Asia-Pacifc Economic Cooperation (APEC), 170 Asia 'share' the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF), 170 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 20, 59, 67–69, 68n5, 72, 93, 102, 170, 215, 331, 336 Atlantic Charter, 116 Australia, 69 *Averting the Old Age Crisis*, 121

1Note: Page numbers followed by 'n' refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2021 341 K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9

#### **B**

*Babies and Bosses*, 194, 197, 198 Bachelet, Michelle, 127 Bangladesh, 261, 262, 303 Ban Ki-moon, 287 Berg Report, 305 Beveridge Report, 116, 117 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), 237 Bologna Process, 164 Boyd Orr, John, 300 Bretton Woods, 32, 40, 187n1, 190

#### **C**

Cambodia, 68n5, 282 Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF), 265 Cancun Agreements, 265 Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), 267 Caribbean Community (CARICOM), 170 *A Caring World*, 194 Chicago Boys, 119 Chief Executives Board of the UN (UNCEB), 127 Child labor/children's rights/child rights norms, 20, 38, 39, 41, 62, 67, 68, 86, 139–160, 331, 334–337 Child Labour Platform (CLP), 152 Child welfare, 140 Chile, 119, 127, 284 China, 69 Civil society organizations/civil society groups, 6, 35, 63, 66, 93, 212, 216, 224, 288, 309 Climate change, 21, 255–268, 277, 311, 312, 327–329, 333 Climate-smart agriculture, 312 *Coalition for a Global Social Floor (CGSF)*, 125

Cold War, 120, 276, 283 Colombo, Francesca, 249 Colonialism, 280, 281 Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth (HEEG), 86, 104 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), 309 Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)/ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 207, 208n2, 212, 213, 215–217, 221–224, 329, 331 Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)/Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20, 39, 141, 144, 147, 149, 150, 156–158, 213, 221, 335 Committee on World Food Security (CFS), 304, 310, 313 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 170 Conditional cash transfer (CCT), 8, 125, 194 Conference of States Parties (COSP), 212, 217–219, 221, 222 Conference of the Parties (COP21), 260 Conference on the Human Environment (CHE), 257 Constructivism/constructivist theories, 5, 19 Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), 303, 305 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 146, 221 Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE), 237 Coordinadora de Centrales Sindicales del Cono Sur (CCSCS), 70

Core Labour Standards (CLS), 62, 63, 66, 67, 71 Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19), 21, 53, 234, 235, 246–250, 338 Correlates of War (COW), 168 *Costs of Social Security*, 117 Council of Baltic States (CBSS), 170, 175n3 Council of Europe (CoE), 152 Council of Health Ministers of Central America (COMISCA), 93 Covenant of the League of Nations (CLN), 32 Critical Theory, 156

#### **D**

Danube Commission, 280, 336 De Schutter, Olivier, 309, 310 Decent Jobs for Youth (DJY), 48–51 Decent work agenda (DWA), 63, 71, 188, 196, 197 Declaration of Philadelphia, 61, 116–118, 190 Declaration of the Rights of the Child (DRC), 147 Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), 310 Defned beneft (DB), 114 Defned contribution (DC), 114 Denmark, 43n13, 300 Deregulation, 201, 305, 306 Developing countries, 7, 65, 72, 90, 92, 101, 115, 121–123, 129, 166, 258, 265, 300, 301, 304 Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC), 191 Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA), 190, 192–194, 197, 336 Disability policy, 208–224, 208n2–209n2

Disability rights movement, 211, 216 Disabled persons' organizations (DPOs), 212, 215–217, 220, 222 Division for Inclusive Social Development (DISD), 212, 217n4 Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD), 217, 217n4 Doctors Without Borders (MSF), 237 Dodd, Norris E., 301 Doing Business report, 66 Dublin Principles, 285, 287

#### **E**

Early Childhood Development (ECD), 194 East African Community (EAC), 93 Economic and Social Advisory Forum (ESAF), 70 Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), 170 Economic crisis, 126–131, 332 Economic growth, 66, 104, 114, 122, 164, 172, 176, 180, 183, 300, 306 Economic liberalization, 90 Economic Ministers Meeting, (Asia-Europe Meeting) Economic Ministers Meeting (AEMM), 68 Economic utilitarianism, 177, 182 Education enforcement plans, 38 Education policy, 8, 164–168, 175n3, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 337 Environmental and Social Standards (ESS), 67 Environmental crises, 289 Environmental footprint, 312 Environmental problems, 256 Ethical recruitment, 91, 94, 99, 101, 102, 105, 107

Ethiopia, 298, 303

European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASIE), 215 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 129 European Commission (EC), 49, 152, 153, 215 European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 170, 177 European Monetary Union (EMU), 128 European Union (EU), 8, 59, 72, 93, 114, 115, 118, 128, 130, 131, 151–153, 170, 215, 329, 331, 337 Experimentalist governance, 223

#### **F**

Family policy, 21, 187–203, 330, 336 Financial Stability Board (FSB), 85 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 48n20, 258, 262, 263, 298–312, 309n10, 310n11, 315, 334 Food crisis, 196, 202, 303 Food policy, 298–315, 336 Food production, 299, 300, 304, 311, 316 Food security, 140, 142, 150, 151, 297–299, 303–308, 310, 313, 334, 335 Ford Foundation, 303 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), 129 Fourth UN Conference on Women, 191 France, 282 Freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB), 60–64, 66–68, 70

Free Trade Unions/International Trade Union Confederation (ICFTU/ITUC), 65 Friedman, Milton, 118, 119 Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (FUNDAMENTALS), 71

#### **G**

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 86, 307 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), 92, 96, 164 General Measures of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 141 Germany, 222 Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), 309 Global Code of Practice on the Ethical Recruitment of Health Personnel (GCPERHP), 91, 92, 94, 101, 102, 104, 106 Global Commission on Health Employment and Growth (HEEG), 86, 92, 104 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), 260 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), 260 Global crises, 250, 330 Global disability policy, 208n2, 209–224 Global economic paradigm, 115, 131 Global eco-social policy, 255–268 Global Employment Agenda (GEA), 36, 45 Global Financial Crisis fnancial crisis, 188, 196, 202, 287, 288 global economic and fnancial

crises, 250

Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), 86, 91, 99 Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund), 151, 237 Global governance of pension policy, 113 Global health actor, 236, 242, 243 Global health developments/ governance/-policies/-policy, 84, 91, 233–250, 330, 333 Global Health Workers Network/ Global Health Workers Alliance, 107 Global Health Workforce Network (GHWN), 101 Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS), 303 Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth' (GIDJY), 47, 48, 48n20 Global labor standards (GLS), 57–72, 333 Global migration governance, 91, 95, 99 Global Migration Group (GMG), 86 Global migration policy, 84, 99 Global North, 96, 116, 159, 188, 221, 222, 257 Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection, 130 Global Partnership for Youth Employment (GPYE), 37, 44–50, 45n15 Global pension governance, 116 Global Policy Advisory Council (GPAC), 104 Global policy on health worker migration, 85, 86, 90, 95, 101, 106 Global public health crisis, 90 Global Skills Partnerships (GSP), 105–107, 333

Global social challenge, 21 Global South, 57, 65, 120, 125, 150, 153, 157, 159, 166, 188, 213, 221, 222, 298, 299, 305, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313, 315 Global water governance, 284, 289 Global Water Partnership (GWP), 285–288 Global water policy, 275, 276, 279, 280, 283–289 Golden age of welfare (1945–1970s), 115 Grassroots (organizations), 63 Green Climate Fund (GCF), 265 Green growth, 268 Green Revolution, 302, 303 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 67, 113, 121, 128, 129 Group of Seven (G7), 265 Group of Twenty (G20), 126, 127, 190, 202, 309 Growth Commission, 198

#### **H**

Habitat for Humanity (HABITAT), 284 Health care for all (HFA), 245 Health care system, 21, 233–250, 333 Health Multi-Partner Trust Fund (MPTF), 104 Health sector, 90, 240 Health Worker Migration Initiative (HWMI), 91, 91n2, 94, 104, 104n4 HelpAge International (HAI), 125 High Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security (HLPE), 313 Historical institutionalism, 14 Human and labor rights, 241 Human capital theory, 37, 38

Human development, 37, 96, 164, 181 Human Development Network Section on Health, Nutrition and Population, 241 Human rights, 8, 11, 48, 63, 68, 71, 84, 89, 96, 100, 103, 140–142, 144, 147, 152, 156–159, 175, 177, 180, 181, 207, 211, 212, 215, 239, 289, 309, 334, 335 Hungary, 129 Huxley, Julian, 277 Hybrid organizations, 150, 237, 331

#### **I**

Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), 93 Ideational meta-frames, 179 Inaugural Baseline Report, 47 Income security, 36, 113, 114, 117, 122, 124, 126, 127, 196, 197, 242, 248, 313 India Indonesia, 68n5, 245 Indus, 281, 282 Informal workforce/informal workers, 64 Information and communication technologies (ICTs), 213, 216, 219, 222 Institutions of social protection, 234, 238 Integrated water resources management (IWRM), 276, 285–289 Inter-Agency Committee on the Climate Agenda (IACCA), 262 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), 159 Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), 48n20, 170, 175n3

Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Cooperation (IFESCCO), 170, 171, 173, 175n3 Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs), 5, 7n1, 156, 167, 167n1, 266, 326 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 257–260 Interim Mekong Committee, 282 Inter-IO discourse, 246 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 32, 36–38, 122, 240 International Classifcation of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF), 210, 222 International Classifcation of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps (ICIDH), 210 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffc in Women and Children, 145 International Council for Science (ICSU), 258, 262 International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW), 130 International Development Association (IDA), 122, 240, 302 International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC), 210, 216, 217 International Federation of Pension Funds Administrator (FIAP), 123 International Finance Corporation (IFC), 122, 123, 200, 264, 267 International Financial Institutions (IFIs), 66, 121, 298, 304, 305, 311

Intergovernmental Foundation for

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 266, 304 International health worker migration, 86, 89, 90, 98, 102, 104, 329 International health worker recruitment, 102, 104 International human rights instruments, 103 International Hydrological Decade (IHD), 279, 283, 284, 329 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 260, 284 International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), 299, 300, 336 International labor standards (ILS), 35, 89, 94, 96, 101, 102 International Labour Conference (ILC), 117, 124, 126, 192 International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, 41, 70 International Labour Organization Lead Country Network, 43, 44, 46 International Labour Organization Nursing Personnel Recommendation, 89, 91, 94, 95, 104 International Labour Organization (ILO), 6, 32, 58, 61–64, 85, 114, 117, 145, 150, 168, 188, 210, 234, 261, 299, 327 International migration, 91, 95, 98, 101 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 39–42, 66, 85, 90, 115, 202 International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO), 90, 93, 326

International Olympic Committee (IOC), 43n13, 262 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 86, 91, 92, 96, 99, 104, 188, 202, 260, 261 International political economy, 90 International Relations (IR), 5, 7, 7n1, 11–13, 16, 19, 168, 326 International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), 266 International Social Security Association (ISSA), 123 International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 48n20, 218, 219, 222 International Union Conservation of Nature and Human Resources (IUCN), 257–259 International Water Resources Association (IWRA), 284–286 International Youth Foundation (IYF), 44, 45n15, 47 Islamic Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), 171, 173, 175

### **J**

Japan, 69 Joint United Nations Programme on human immunodefciency virus/ Acquired Immune Defciency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) (UNAIDS), 158, 237

#### **K**

Kenya, 262 Keynesianism, 180, 182 Knowledge production, 235

#### **L**

Labor migration, 32, 51, 89, 90, 95, 99, 100, 104 Laos PDR, 282 La Via Campesina (LVC), 310 Lead Country Networks, 43, 44, 46 League of Nations (LON), 32, 145, 147 Leitmotif, 4, 16, 19, 21, 68, 92, 141, 156–159, 174–182, 275, 326, 332, 334 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI), 202 Liberalization of trade, 63, 305, 306 Lilienthal, David, 281 Lobbying, 18, 123, 129

#### **M**

Maastricht Criteria, 128 Malawi, 298 McNamara, Robert, 190, 194, 302 Mekong, 282 Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur), 20, 59, 67, 68, 70–72, 170, 175n3, 331 Mercado Común del Sur Labor Market Observatory, 71 Mercado Común del Sur Socio-Labor Declaration, 70 Mexico, 211 Migration governance, migration, migrants, 19, 20, 32, 64, 67, 83–108, 144, 150, 191, 202, 233, 259–261, 326, 329, 333–335, 337 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 37, 43, 46, 51, 95, 104, 107, 139, 153, 239, 259, 287, 288, 308, 327, 330 Millennium Summit, 37, 42, 45 Modernization theories, 300 Montreal Protocol, 258

Moreno, Lenín, 217 Multilateralism, 249, 338 Multilateral Social Security Agreement, 70 Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII), 266 Myanmar, 262

#### **N**

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), 265 National Plans of Action (NPA), 156 Neo-institutionalism, 11 Neoliberal discourse, 20, 58, 59, 64, 66, 72 Neoliberal economic policy, 305 Neoliberalism/neo-liberalism, 6, 66–67, 90, 95, 121, 182, 191, 192, 195, 201, 285, 286 Neoliberal structural adjustment, 190 Nepal, 262 New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC), 197, 336 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 89, 95 New Orientations for Social Policy, 194 New productivist agenda, 311 New Urban Agenda (NUA), 261 New Zealand, 69, 211 Niger, 298 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 5, 7, 7n1, 43, 44, 46, 61, 91n2, 104n4, 107, 152, 156, 163, 167, 201, 208, 215, 217, 220, 237, 267, 285, 306, 328, 331 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 168 Not in Education, Employment or

Training (NEET), 33

#### **O**

Offcial development assistance (ODA), 266 Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on a Communications Procedure (OP3-CRC), 149 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 4, 7–9, 21, 38–40, 49, 58, 59, 86, 90, 92, 96, 105, 106, 113–116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 152, 164–166, 170, 172, 173, 175, 180, 181, 188, 190, 192–199, 195n5, 201, 202, 214, 219, 224, 234, 238, 243–245, 248–250, 259, 288, 327–330, 332–338 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Health Division, 249 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Health Project, 243 Organizational Ecology, 5, 12, 13, 19, 85, 95, 107, 108, 150–154, 326 Organizational environment, 13–15, 115–116, 131, 189, 190, 208, 328, 336 Organization of American States (OAS), 170 Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), 170 Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI), 171 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 304

Oxfam America, 266, 267

#### **P**

Pakistan, 281 Paradigm shift, 51, 182, 332 Paris Agreement, 265 Path dependency, 12, 14 Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG), 114, 128 Pension policies, 113, 114, 116, 117, 125, 128 Philanthropic organizations, 237 Philippines Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), 260 Pinochet, Augusto, 119 Poland, 121, 128 Post-global economic crisis era, 115 Post-Washington Consensus, 180 Post-World War II, 257 Post-WWII UN agencies, 41 Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM), 191 Primary Health Care (PHC), 239, 245, 247 Principal-agent model, 14, 208 Private health care systems, 233 Privatization, 119, 120, 126–128, 129n1, 285, 286, 288 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 164, 166, 170, 175, 337 Public health care systems, 233

### **R**

Rational choice theory, 11 Rational Planning, 284 Reagan, Ronald, 118 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), 69 Regionalism, 69 Regional Offce for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), 93

Regional Organizations, 6, 20, 58, 59, 67–68, 72, 142, 152, 170, 209, 215, 331, 335 Regional Socio-Labor Commission, 70 Rights of the Child (CRC), 141, 144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156–158, 213, 221, 335 River Basin Organizations (RBOs), 278–282 Rockefeller Foundation, 47 Rural organizations, 315 Rural Welfare Division (RWD), 299, 301 Russia, 280

#### **S**

Sarkozy, Nicholas, 127 Save the Children (SC), 152 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), 260, 262 Small Island Developing States (SIDS), 266 Social constructivism, 16 Social discourse, 20, 60, 62, 64, 72 Social health protection, 239, 242, 248 Social justice, 35, 37, 140, 141, 175, 236, 241, 335 Social network analysis (SNA), 217, 223 Social protection, 7, 8, 10, 11, 36, 40, 52, 63, 84, 85, 96, 106, 107, 114, 124–127, 129, 130, 146, 193, 196, 198, 199, 201, 202, 215, 234, 238–243, 245, 247, 248, 261, 267, 305, 313–315, 327, 333, 336 Social Protection and Labor (SPL), 39, 46, 125 Social Protection Floor Initiative (SPF-I), 127, 239, 242, 245, 250, 328, 330

Social Protection Interagency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B), 127, 246, 247, 333 Social Protection Strategic Framework, 314 Social welfare, 139 Social well-being, 256, 333 Socio-Labor Commission, 70, 71 Socio-Labor Declaration, 70 Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE), 46–51 Somalia, 298 Somavía, Juan, 193 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), 170 Southern African Development Community (SADC), 93 South Korea Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), 170, 171, 173 Stiglitz, Joseph, 115, 125, 196 Structural adjustment period, 312 Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), 115, 194, 284 Structural problems, 315 Supranational organization, 215 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 11, 18, 21, 47, 51, 93, 95, 104, 129, 139, 151, 153, 166, 182, 188, 239, 241, 244, 259, 288, 289, 298, 308, 327, 330, 332

#### **T**

Tanzania Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Proft Sharing (BEPS), 202

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 277, 281, 282

Thatcher, Margaret, 118

Theories of rational decision making, 278

Treaty of Versailles, 32 Twitter, 209, 215–224

#### **U**

Understanding Children's Work, 44 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), 170, 173, 177 United Kingdom (UK/Great Britain), 43n13, 117, 118, 210, 211, 300, 303 United Nations (UN), 35–41, 43, 44, 46–49, 48n20, 61, 83, 86, 89, 90, 94, 96, 103, 106, 114, 118, 125, 127, 142, 146, 147, 153, 168, 173, 175, 190, 191, 195, 207, 211–213, 216–224, 238, 239, 241, 257, 259, 260, 265, 282, 288, 299, 301, 302, 304, 311, 327–329, 335 United Nations Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology for Development, 103 United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), 103 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), 258 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD), 48n20, 86, 89, 90, 94, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106 United Nations Conference on Water in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 283 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 20, 141–143, 145, 147, 149, 150, 335 United Nations Declaration of Human

Rights (UDHR), 116


United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 48n20, 168, 260 The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), 58 United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), 260, 261 United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), 43n13, 45, 48n20, 258 United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), 103 United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (ICEF), 39 United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF), 4, 21, 39–40, 49, 52, 53, 86, 106, 125, 130, 144, 147, 150–153, 156, 168, 177, 187, 187n1, 188, 191, 194, 201, 212, 213, 217, 245, 247, 263, 309, 313–315, 332 United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), 191 United Nations Offce for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), 260, 262 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 48n20, 151, 187, 195,

260, 261 United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA) population dynamics and climate change adaptation online platform (POPClimate), 261

United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), 191, 200–202

United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG), 103, 264 United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, 129, 262 United Nations system, 84, 86, 91, 103, 106, 166, 170, 216, 237, 238, 240, 242, 262, 301, 304, 327–329, 331, 332, 335 United Nations University (UNU), 266 United Nations Watercourses Convention, 279 United Nations Women (UN Women), 191, 200–202, 262 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 123 United States of America (USA), 72, 118, 120, 170, 173, 201, 210, 211, 265, 277, 278, 281, 283, 300, 301, 314n22 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 118 Universal health coverage (UHC), 21, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 239–242, 244, 246–248, 250, 330

### **V**

Vanuatu, 262 Vientiane Declaration on Transition from Informal Employment, 69 Vietnam, 282

#### **W**

Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM), 265 Washington Consensus, 41, 180, 182,

191, 195, 285, 305 Weather Risk Management Facility (WRMF), 266

WHO Global Code, 93, 102, 106

Women in Global Health (WGH), 101 Working Party 6 (WP6), 193 Working Sub-Group No. 10, 70 World Bank/World Bank Group (WB), 6, 8, 9, 19–21, 32, 34–38, 40–53, 41n9, 42n12, 43n13, 58, 59, 61, 66–67, 72, 86, 90–94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 106, 114–116, 118–131, 129n1, 146, 151, 165, 166, 168, 172, 173, 179–181, 188, 190, 191, 194–196, 199–202, 210, 212, 213, 234, 237–242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 250, 258, 259, 265, 267, 279, 281, 282, 284–286, 288, 302–307, 307n3, 309, 311–313, 315, 327–330, 332–336 World Climate Conference (WCC), 258 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 258, 285 World Declaration on Education for All (EFA), 146 World Development Report (WDR), 199, 311, 312 World Economic Forum (WEF), 287, 288 World Food Board, 300 World Food Conference (WFC), 303, 304 World Food Council (WFC), 304 World Food Programme (WFP), 261, 266, 267, 301, 302, 309, 310, 314 World Food Summit (WFS), 308, 309 World Health Assembly (WHA), 100, 238

World Health Organization (WHO), 85, 86, 89–94, 96, 98–104, 106, 127, 150, 153, 187, 209–210, 213, 216, 219, 222–224, 234, 237–247, 250, 258, 262, 309, 330, 332, 333, 335, 338 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 96 World Labor Report, 242 World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 257–259, 262, 283 World Summit for Social Development (WSSD), 191 World Trade Organization (WTO), 20, 58, 60, 64–68, 72, 85, 92, 93, 96, 102, 106, 164, 298, 307, 310, 311, 315, 335 World War I (WWI), 32, 117, 190 World War II (WWII), 32, 117, 209, 299, 302, 336 World Water Congress, 284–286 World Water Council (WWC), 286 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 258

#### **Y**

Yearbook of International Organizations (YIO), 168 Young, Mary Eming, 194 Youth Business International (YBI), 47, 48n20 Youth Employment Network (YEN), 37, 42–46, 43n13, 48–50 Youth labor migration, 51 Youth unemployment (YU), 19, 31–53, 158, 330, 337