From Co-Operation to Co-Optation: What the Take-Over of Roll Back Malaria by External Actors Tells Us About Organizational Boundaries, Diplomacy, and Future Scenarios for Global Governance

The Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership was created as a pioneering public-private partnership in the late 1990s. While its designation as a public-private partnership was exemplary for the changing relationship between public and private actors at the time, in organizational terms, it was a cabinet project within the secretariat of the World Health Organization (WHO). A few years later, and following an external evaluation, the partnership gained more independence within WHO when it received its own governance structures. Following yet another evaluation of the partnership in 2013, the partnership’s board even closed down its secretariat, left the WHO, selected UNOPS as its new hosting agency, and reopened with a new secretariat. This institutional change was accompanied by jet another change in the partnership’s governance structure: while the previous board had gained its legitimacy from the constituencies that its members represented, the new board was based on meritocracy and staffed with people who acted in an individual capacity. Drawing on participant observation (including informal conversations), formal interviews, and written documents, the paper will first of all reconstruct the process in the course of which WHO reached out to external – often “private” – actors and eventually found the partnership essentially being taken over by some of these external actors. Both this reconstruction of the process and the ensuing discussion of its consequences will show that the boundaries of collective actors are often incredibly fuzzy and that it is even challenging to find an adequate vocabulary to describe organizational realities. In particular, dichotomies like public and private are, on the one hand, inevitable for a discussion of the case but, on the other hand, run the risk of obscuring just as much as they shed light on. In spite of this fuzziness and the complexities of the process, however, the paper will still show that the most recent reform of the partnership constitutes a clear departure from previous approaches to diplomacy and global governance that worked with the notion of representation as its foundation. This analysis holds even though the present set-up is not as radical as some of the proposals that were made in the course of the most recent reform discussions.