Editing Implications of the Pandemic, Part 2 (section)

==== The WHO’s Failures: Influence of Global Governance on Domestic Institutions and Policy ====
Global governance refers to the network of institutions, mostly non-governmental and multilateral, that coordinate with transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, and resolve disputes. It involves governance, without sovereign authority, of relationships that transcend national frontier (Finkelstein, 1995). There are more NGOs than ever before, playing the role of powerful actors, involved in shaping policy, negotiating agreements, and monitoring rates of compliance by states with those agreements. According to Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri in Explaining the failure of global health governance during COVID-19, global governance is key to state transformation, and state authority is outsourced to “diverse, fragmented actors with enhanced autonomy from domestic democratic constraints, allowing many to engage, and increasingly develop joint policies with, their overseas counterparts”. Then, “these networks develop rules, standards, guidelines and other forms of ‘soft’ international law, which national agencies are then directed to embed domestically. Implementation is typically monitored and encouraged through benchmarking against internationally agreed standards, rather than coercion”. Importantly, these networks are directly linked to powerful states’ ostensibly domestic institutions through their acquisition of international functions. In this manner, international organizations such as the WHO are used for meta-governance. Rather than governing from the outside, through the direct imposition of global rules on member states, they chiefly operate through cultivating changes within states to harmonize domestic policies, institutions and procedures. In this manner, global governance circumvents negotiations, and roadblocks in agreements and multilateral cooperation between states. Delinking policy-making from domestic political processes tends to weaken the effect and intent of the policy. This is where the failures of the WHO can be arrived at. Jones and Hameiri state that since the WHO has come under donor control, its agenda has given way to pro-market meta-governance, compromised the WHO’s independence and its pandemic response capacity, leaving it unable to do much beyond regulating and evaluating national arrangements.<blockquote>“In 1982 the WHO budget was frozen and in 1985 the United States withheld 80 per cent of its financial commitment in protest at the WHO’s Essential Drugs Program, which American pharmaceutical companies opposed. Wealthy states increasingly rerouted support for health-care development through the World Bank, thus subordinating it to the structural adjustment agenda, leading to a wave of privatizations and cost-cutting, followed by a push for public–private partner- ships.. The WHO’s operational budget was slashed, leaving it dependent on voluntary donations. By the 2000s, discretionary donor funding comprised around 80 per cent of WHO expenditure, making it subservient to wealthy countries’ demands.”</blockquote>At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hollowing out of the WHO left it subservient to major donors, which now included China, where the outbreak originated, further attenuating its response. The WHO’s most disastrous act was to endorse China’s lockdown policy, which fuelled mounting panic and calls for extraordinary measures across the world, and created intense media and public pressure on other governments to follow suit. The WHO disastrously continued supporting lockdowns long after it became clear that eradication was impossible.