How do international organizations survive legitimacy crises?

This paper joins the growing debate on how IOs may overcome challenges to their legitimacy. Building on Suchman (1995) I offer a theory of ‘pragmatic legitimacy’ which rests on the self-interested calculations of an IO’s most immediate audience: member states. Unlike power and interests, the concept of legitimacy is said to generate support for IOs by appealing to moral reasons (as distinct from purely strategic or self-interested reasons) for accepting their authority. Yet, in the context of IOs, power, interests and legitimacy are inexorably linked. Insofar as international institutions are based on voluntary contracts among states that agree to surrender a measure of sovereign control in pursuit of joint goals, these institutions cannot be regarded as legitimate unless they are seen to advance national self-interests. Thus, whereas the notion of IO legitimacy cannot be reduced to considerations of power and interests it must be sensitive to both. On this basis I suggest that an IO’s perceived legitimacy depends both on whether it achieves the objectives for which it was created, and whether it fairly distributes costs and benefits so as to leave no state clearly worse off than it would be without the institution. Importantly, these are general judgements about the instrumental value of an institution over time—not about specific policies. Moreover, they are shared judgements by states from whom an IO needs support to survive and prosper. This notion of ‘pragmatic legitimacy’ suggests that legitimacy crises arise from deep and ongoing dissatisfaction with the outputs or distribution of benefits generated by an IO which calls into question its value to a significant number of patrons. How such crises are resolved depends on which aspects of an IO’s functions are challenged. When faced with ‘distributive challenges’ (i.e., charges of unfair divisions of gains or biased practices) IOs may respond by appealing to ‘community-based’ interests or by redistributing formal influence towards disaffected parties. When charged with poor goal attainment IOs may instead invoke technical expertise or ally with powerful non-state actors in an effort to improve performance and reduce governance costs. To explore these ideas empirically, I consider a number of IOs which became objects of distributive conflict among developing and developed countries following decolonization. Some died, others survived by re-distributing institutional power among members, or by building alliances with sub-state or transnational sectoral constituencies. Examples in the first category include regional organizations like the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara and the Inter-African Committee on Statistics which brought together newly independent states and former colonial powers in pursuit of broad socio-economic goals, and the Universal Copyright Union whose legitimacy loss all proved fatal. In the second category is the WHO which sought to preserve legitimacy in the eyes of developing countries by adopting a global health agenda focused on development while also reinventing itself as a ‘business-friendly’ venue to appeal to developed states. By exploring the survival strategies of IOs facing severe, but diverse, legitimacy challenges I seek to discover the different legitimation strategies available to IOs.