Resourcing International Organizations

From climate change to pandemics to global inequality — International Organizations are mandated to address some of the biggest challenges humanity is facing in the 21st century. They perform these functions under intense budgetary pressure (Patz and Goetz 2019). For example, the World Health Organization’s total global annual budget is only around 50% of the health budget of Greece, and the UN Development Program’s entire budget for development assistance adds up to approximately 13% of the money that the United States Agency for International Development has at its disposal. Recently, the pressure on IO finances has further intensified due to a rise in earmarking and a tendency of member states to withhold funding. First, earmarked funding has risen sharply over the last fifty years and now makes up at least 50% of the resources IOs have at their disposal (Eichenauer and Reinsberg 2017). This development has sparked a heated debate. While advocates pinpoint potential efficiency gains and greater accountability afforded by tailored reporting on earmarked funds, critics believe this funding diminishes organizational capacities to respond to emergent challenges and thus undermines IO effectiveness. Second, member states increasingly resort to withholding funding altogether to coerce IOs into adhering to their policy preference. As a result, IOs have been faced with an increasing tendency of member states to withhold funding to push for policy change (Babb 2009; Eckhard, Patz, and Schmidt 2019; Hüfner 2017). This trend has further intensified with the emergence of parties and leaders challenging the core tenets of multilateralism. For example, former US President Donald Trump severely cut US contributions to several IOs and withdrew from UNESCO altogether. IOs recognize pressure on their resources as one of the biggest threats to their mandates, and try to increase their finances. They have done so by expanding their resource base beyond member states and accepting contributions from the private sector (da Conceição-Heldt and Dörfler 2021), private foundations (Clinton and Sridhar 2017; Seitz and Martens 2017), or even individual donations (Ramachandran, Leo, and McCarthy 2010). However, such expansions could affect not only the resources they have at their disposal but also the distribution of power among principals and the autonomy of IOs from particular interests (Graham 2017; Graham and Serdaru 2020; Lall 2017). This Workshop brings together scholars interested in understanding the causes and consequences of IO resourcing as well as their implications for the future of IO autonomy and effectiveness in managing global challenges. We are interested in contributions that represent the methodological and theoretical diversity of scholarship on international relations. Questions we seek to address include, but are not limited to:  What explains these trends in IO financing?  Why are particular IOs financed in the way they are?  How does this financial make-up shape the relative power distribution of different actors in IO decision-making?  What factors affect how IOs spend these resources?  To what extent does resourcing influence IO performance and effectiveness?