International Organizations’ Blame Avoidance Strategies: WHO is Made Responsible in Global Health Crises?

How do the administrations of international organizations (IOs) respond to their member states’ blame attributions? Research often depicts IOs as ideal scapegoats for their member states as they lack the opportunities, willingness, and ability to react. We argue, by contrast, that IO representatives try to prevent ‘their’ IOs from taking member states’ blame in public. IOs are thus not passive blame takers, but active blame avoiders. In some cases, they are willing to ignore the attribution of blame by their member states, but in other cases they try to defend their criticised policies or even attack the member states. To explain this, we develop a theory of blame avoidance by IO administrations according to which the authority of an IO shapes the blame avoidance strategy its representatives adopt. Depending on whether the authority an IO exercises is intergovernmental, supranational, or hybrid, its administration will react to blame attributions from its member states through strategies of ignoring, blurring or attacking. We test our theory by assessing public responsibility attributions by the administrations of the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) for six contested policies: the UN Oil for food program for Irak, UNPROFOR's failure during the Srebrenica massacre, and the UN terror lists as well as the global health policies addressing SARS, H1N1, and COVID-19.