GLOBAL DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL POLICY

# **International Organizations in Global Social Governance**

Edited by **Kerstin Martens Dennis Niemann Alexandra Kaasch**

# Global Dynamics of Social Policy

Series Editors Lorraine Frisina Doetter University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Delia González de Reufels University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Kerstin Martens University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Marianne Sandvad Ulriksen University of Southern Denmark Odense, Denmark

#### **About the Series**

The intervention of states in felds such as health, social security and work, dates back to the nineteenth century, and became more dynamic over time. Imperial Prussia, a social policy pioneer, frst showcased its progress at the Paris World Fair in 1900: the Prussian exhibit drew large crowds eager to fnd out more about state pensions. Clearly, social policy had become a matter of great interest to states and citizens alike.

Other nations soon embarked on implementing discrete social policies, thus turning the twentieth century into a time of remarkable welfare state expansion. The end of World War II marked a new departure, as an increasing number of countries outside the Western hemisphere began to introduce social policy measures. States not only copied established forms of welfare, but often developed measures *sui-generis* to meet their specifc needs. While episodes of policy retrenchment and ruptures can be observed over time, recent developments point to an expansion of social policies in low-to-upper-middle-income countries of the Global South. Social policy has thus become a global phenomenon.

It is generally accepted that the state is responsible for welfare and that domestic politics and ideas have been a primary driver of its expansion. However, in an increasingly interconnected world, social policy is implemented at the national-level but infuenced by international developments and relations. It is shaped by trade, migration, war, and colonialism. Just as people travel, policy ideas follow. These factors merit scholarly attention and demand interdisciplinary collaboration to generate new insights into the global dimension of social policy.

This is what the Global Dynamics of Social Policy book series sets out to accomplish. In doing so, it also contributes to the mission of the Collaborative Research Center 1342 (CRC) "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen, Germany. Funded by the German Research Foundation, the CRC leaves behind the traditionally OECD-focused analysis of social policy to stress the transnational interconnectedness of developments.

The book series showcases scholarship by colleagues worldwide who are interested in the global dynamics of social policy. Studies can range from in-depth case studies, comparative work and large quantitative research. Moreover, the promotion of scholarship by young researchers is of great importance to the series. The series is published in memory of Stephan Leibfried to whom our research on state and social policy at the CRC is indebted in countless ways.

> Series Editors: Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Delia González de Reufels, Kerstin Martens, Marianne S. Ulriksen

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16294

Open access of this publication was made possible through funding by the Collaborative Research Center 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy at the University of Bremen, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 374666841 – SFB 1342 and Specialised Information Service Political Science – POLLUX.

Kerstin Martens Dennis Niemann • Alexandra Kaasch Editors

# International Organizations in Global Social Governance

*Editors* Kerstin Martens Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Dennis Niemann Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

Alexandra Kaasch Faculty of Sociology Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9

ISSN 2661-8672 ISSN 2661-8680 (electronic) Global Dynamics of Social Policy ISBN 978-3-030-65438-2 ISBN 978-3-030-65439-9 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication.

**Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

Chapters 2, 4 and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND license. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

# Acknowledgments

This book is based on an authors' workshop held at the University of Bremen in May 2019. As the editors we are grateful to the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen and the Institute for World Society Studies at Bielefeld University for supporting not only us, but also the other experts on IOs and social policy issues who participated in this event. The Bremen CRC 1342 is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342. The workshop aimed at improving our understanding of the role of International Organizations in Global Social Policy by mapping them and analyzing their discourses. We are grateful to the workshop participants, who contributed signifcantly to the development of this book with their expertise and experience, and to a number of people without whom the realization of this volume would not have been possible. Special thanks go to Armando Barrientos, Chris Deeming, Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Sigrid Hartong, Matias Margulis, and Heiko Pleines, who commented on and contributed to individual sessions. We also want to thank Nicole Henze and Gabrielle Bieser for having perfectly organized the symposium, and Monika Sniegs, who together with Nicole and Gabrielle contributed signifcantly to the content alignment of the book.

# Praise for *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*

"Although international organizations have long played a substantial role in social policy, scholarly research on their nature, discourse, and impact has only taken off in the last few decades. Featuring a strong line-up of contributors, this edited volume maps international organizations and their discourses across an impressive number of social policy areas ranging from health and labour to immigration and family policy. This excellent volume is a must read for those interested in global social policy."

> —Daniel Béland, *James McGill Professor of Political Science, McGill University, Canada*

"Recognizing and appreciating the dynamics of Global Social Governance is all the more important these days in our global 'community of fate. First, this volume provides an invaluable conceptual understanding of the causes and consequences of cross-border social issues. Second, the authors recount how international organizations have evolved and expanded not only as public service providers with innovations in policy delivery but also as power-holders in social governance through a strong capacity to defne the parameters of policy."

> —Diane Stone, *Professor of Transnational Governance, European University Institute, Italy*

"What role do international organizations (IOs) play in social policy worldwide? Some posit that IOs refect the will of their constituent states. However, other scholars have found that IOs have substantial autonomy, generate their own ideas, and learn from their environments and experiences, acting as "forums for exchange, contention, and cooperation." With chapters covering a wide range of policy domains, every student of global social policy will need to check out this excellent book"

> —Mitchell A. Orenstein, *Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania, US*

# Contents

# Notes on Contributors

**Ross Fergusson** is Senior Lecturer of Social Policy at The Open University (OU), UK. His research interests are in socially excluded young people, the relationships between social policy and youth criminal justice, and youth unemployment internationally. Recent books he has written include: *Young People, Welfare and Crime: Governing Non-participation* (2016); and (with Nicola Yeates) *Global Youth Unemployment* (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2021). His PhD, by published work, is in Social Policy and Criminology (Open University, UK).

**Martin Heneghan** is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is researching the impact of Brexit on fnancial centers in the UK. His PhD was undertaken at the University of Sheffeld. It focused on international organizations and how they compete and cooperate to shape pension and social protection policies.

**Jakob Henninger** is a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen and an affliated fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science. His research focuses on immigrant welfare rights, the welfare state, and civil society activism.

**Anna Holzscheiter** is Professor of International Politics at TU Dresden in Germany. She is also Head of the Research Group on "Governance for Global Health" at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin. She has done research and published on norms in international relations, discourse analysis, non-state actors in international politics, human rights—especially the rights of children and young people—and on global social policy, including health policy in particular. Her current research focuses on institutional complexity in global health, as well as norm collisions in international politics.

**Alexandra Kaasch** is Professor in German and Transnational Social Policy at Bielefeld University, Germany. She was previously a senior researcher at the University of Bremen and a lecturer at the University of Sheffeld. Her research interests include global social policy and governance, comparative social policy, and international organizations. She is lead editor of the journal *Global Social Policy* and co-editor of the book series *Research in Comparative and Global Social Policy*. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffeld, UK. Among her recent publications is a Special Issue in Global Social Policy in honor of Bob Deacon.

**Nina Kolleck** is a professor at Leipzig University in Germany. She holds a PhD in Political Science and a Habilitation in Educational Science (postdoctoral qualifcation) from Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include social network analysis, education policy, comparative and international education research, heterogeneity, sustainability, innovations, and educational reforms.

**Silvana Lakeman** holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen, where she has worked as an early stage researcher and Marie Curie fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Her research evaluates the involvement and inter-agency cooperation of organizations in the areas of migration, environmental and disaster displacement, climate change, and disaster risk reduction. She has worked in both a research and advisory capacity for a range of international and non-governmental organizations. She holds an MA in International Relations from Leiden University and a BA in Economics, Politics, and International Relations from University College Dublin.

**Thuy Dung Le** is Marie Curie Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Her research interests are situated in the feld of global regulatory governance and political economy, focusing on actors in transnational and state regulation processes of labor standards. Her current work examines the interplays between Western laborrelated development aids and trade policy with strategic intermediary pro-labor interventions in contribution to the promotion of labor standards in developing countries.

**Rianne Mahon** is a distinguished research professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She has published on industrial policy, labor market restructuring, childcare politics, and the redesign of welfare regimes on a local, national, and global scale. She has also co-edited numerous books, most recently *Achieving the Social Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges* (with S. Horton and S. Dalby). Her current work focuses on the "gendering" of global governance, with particular reference to migration.

**Kerstin Martens** is Professor of International Relations at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include education policy, NGOs, and international organizations, in particular the OECD and the UN. She heads the research project A05 "The Global Development, Diffusion and Transformation of Education Systems" as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. She has published widely on the above-mentioned research areas, including in leading international journals. She holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

**Dennis Niemann** is a post-doctoral researcher in the project A05 "The Global Development, Diffusion and Transformation of Education Systems" at the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bremen. His research interests include the internationalization of education policy, qualitative methods, and the role of international organizations in global governance. He has published on the soft governance infuence of international organizations, on domestic policy-making, and on recent internationalization processes in the feld of education policy in international journals such as *German Politics*, *Publius: The Journal of Federalism*, *Global Social Policy*, and *European Journal of Education*.

**Jane Pillinger** is an independent researcher and policy advisor working with key organizations in the areas of social policy, migration, employment, and gender equality. She has carried out research and policy advice for global unions, social partner organizations, international organizations such as the ILO, IOM, and UNWomen, as well as for national and European organizations and advocacy movements. She is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at The Open University.

**Friederike Römer** is a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen, as well as a 2019/2020 John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In her research, she focuses on social inequality, migration, and welfare state institutions. In her current project, she investigates the relationship between regional integration and immigrant rights.

**Jeremy J. Schmidt** is Assistant Professor of Geography at Durham University. His research focuses on the social dimensions of water, land, and energy in the context of an Earth system increasingly transformed by human action. He is the author of *Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity* and the co-editor of *Water Ethics: Foundational Readings for Students and Professionals.* He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

**Johannes Schuster** is a research associate at Leipzig University in Germany. He holds a BA in Educational Science from the University of Jena and an MA in Educational Research from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and inclusive education, the diffusion of social innovations and social network analysis.

**Anna Wolkenhauer** is a research associate at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. Her PhD dealt with post-retrenchment state formation through social policy, based on qualitative feldwork in Zambia. Her research focuses on social policy and agriculture in Southern Africa, processes of knowledge production in global social policy, and the question how austerity has shaped the ways of doing politics in the countryside.

**Nicola Yeates** is Professor of Social Policy at The Open University, UK. Her research interests focus on global social policy as a feld of academic study and as a political practice. She has published widely in this feld. Her research monographs include *International Health Worker Migration and Recruitment: Global Governance, Politics and Policy* (with J. Pillinger, 2019) and *Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains* (Palgrave, 2009). She has been closely involved in the journal of *Global Social Policy* (Sage) since it was founded in 2000 and is a former editor of it.

# Abbreviations

#### xxii Abbreviations

# List of Figures

# List of Tables

# Introduction

# The Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance: Examining Populations and Discourses of International Organizations in Social Policies

*Dennis Niemann, Kerstin Martens, and Alexandra Kaasch*

## Introduction

International Organizations (IOs) are vibrant actors of global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention, and cooperation on social policies. IOs prepare, guide, and supervise international treaties about welfare issues which states sign and adhere to. They direct, fnance,

This chapter is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

D. Niemann (\*) • K. Martens

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 3

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_1

and implement projects which affect people's lives. The World Bank, for example, has been identifed as having had a signifcant impact on social policy development in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in some countries in Latin America with regard to pension systems. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) considerably fueled the German debate on appropriate education systems, and the United Nations International Children's Fund (UNICEF) is a very visible actor when it comes to development aid for children. The study of IOs in general has advanced tremendously in recent decades. Today, we have a much better understanding of different types of global actors and their mechanisms of infuence. However, our knowledge about the involvement of IOs varies signifcantly by policy feld. While scholarship on IOs often focuses on issue areas like security, economics, or environmental policies, we know comparatively little about the specifc roles of IOs in social policies. Furthermore, within global social policy and governance studies, there have been very few systematic attempts to analyze different social policy felds in their dimension of global actor involvement.

With this book, we intend to enhance and systematize our understanding of IOs in global social governance. It provides studies on a variety of social policy felds in which different, but also the same, IOs operate. Basically, the chapters in this book have *two purposes*: On the one hand, they shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs. They explore how a particular global social policy feld is constituted as a whole, and which are the dominant IOs setting the trends. On the other hand, the contributions examine the *discourses* within and between these IOs on the respective social policies. Thus, the chapters present the ideas IOs are promoting as well as their policies and leitmotifs which guide the discourses they produce. By examining the population of IOs and their discourses in different policy felds, the book both gathers insights from different projects on global social policy felds and opens the foor for comparing IO involvement in those felds. We generate new insights and future steps for describing and theorizing global social governance as an *architecture of arguments*. By this, we refer to the specifc and varying constellations of IOs in different social policy felds and their patterns of discourse that characterize global social policies.

A. Kaasch

Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
In this introduction, we frst briefy recap in broad strokes the knowledge about the purposes, functions, and characteristics of IOs in general, and their involvement in social policy issues. Thus, we look at 'public' organizations, namely at IOs which are understood as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), in which states are the prime members. We then set out some basic conceptualizations for studying IOs in global social governance before specifying our framework for exploring populations and discourses of IOs in global social policies. Complementing liberal and constructivist International Relations (IR) theories, we use organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for our analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance. 'Populations' are identifed as the dominant as well as regional IOs active in a specifc social policy issue; they are analyzed in their current state but also from a historical perspective. In this volume, the concept of 'discourse' is understood as the strategic way in which individuals or collective actors frame ideas, and not as a structural understanding of how certain meanings infuence behavior.

Overall, despite intense scholarly work focusing on IOs, looking at specifc policy felds and the roles, characteristics, or functions of single IOs and of IOs within their organizational contexts is surprisingly underdeveloped. Furthermore, the differences between such IO populations across different social policy felds are still rarely explored. Although IOs are one of the major components of global social policy and their prominence and infuence in international life has steadily grown over the last decades, we need deeper research about how the population of IOs active in social policy is constituted and to better understand what discourses IOs actually spread in social policy, as they aim to infuence national policies or the international community by means of soft governance with these discourses. This volume seeks to complement research on IOs in social policy by addressing the following sets of research questions:

We fnd that diverse IOs populate the different social policy felds—for a long time and with signifcant impact on the different discourses. While some have been around for a century or even longer, IO activity is fairly new in other felds. All social policy felds are populated by a variety of IOs which consist of universal IOs, but often also regional organizations occupying particular niches. Some IOs, like the International Labour Organization (ILO) or World Bank, are present in multiple social policy felds and shape them by putting forward their ideas. With few exceptions, IOs active in global social policy mainly exert soft governance. They develop and broadcast ideas and norms about social policy issues which are transmitted into national systems. They are recognized normative players due to their reputation in the feld. Overall, we fnd a highly sophisticated architecture of arguments in global social policy which builds on a dense population of IOs and the discourses they spread. The different discourses in the studied social policy felds have idiosyncratic structures but also feature some commonalities. Often, the discourses of IOs are infuenced by general global political and economic developments, like the rise of neoliberalism or globalization.

#### Studying IOs and Social Policy

Different types of actors can be identifed in global social policies. These include civil society organizations, digital movements, formations of states, or even individuals (Kaasch and Martens 2015). In this book, however, we turn our focus exclusively to IOs in order to develop a more profound understanding of the variation of IO infuence in different social policy felds. Nevertheless, despite the long existence of a continuous scholarship on IOs, there is no commonly accepted defnition of the term 'international organization'. However, there is widespread agreement on the characteristics of IOs. As a minimum, IOs are interpreted as international bodies that have been set up through a treaty between nations and thus have an international, legally binding character. Furthermore, IOs have structural bodies which are operating on a continual basis.

For the purposes of studying IOs in social policy, we employ the following defnition: An international organization is a formal institutional arrangement created by an international treaty between at least three sovereign states or government agencies of states and has a permanent organizational body, including a secretariat, staff, headquarters, and a charter that addresses its mission and purpose. Such a defnition follows common practice in IO research (Hooghe et al. 2015) and excludes other international bodies that are not founded by states, such as NGOs (e.g. Amnesty International) as well as those bodies that lack a permanent organizational underpinning, such as groupings or coalitions of states (e.g. the G8/20).1 Among the tasks and functions of IOs are that they prepare, guide, and supervise international treaties. They also direct, fnance, and implement projects, and exercise many more duties such as providing arenas for exchange, networking, and debate.

Scholarly research on IOs has dealt with them, for the most part, within the discipline of International Relations (see e.g. Keohane and Nye 1974; Hurd 2011; Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Nielson and Tierney 2003). IOs have long been participants of international life and they play a signifcant role in managing cooperation, providing forums for multilateral exchange, and in disseminating norms. Thus, research on IOs has focused on "why these phenomena exist, how they function and what effects they have on world politics" (Martin and Simmons 2013, 326). Recent research projects have also dealt with the performance of IOs and their policy output (Tallberg et al. 2013, 2014), as well as the design of IOs in relation to their assigned authority (Hooghe and Marks 2014, Hooghe et al. 2015; Zürn 2018; Abbott et al. 2014). Consequently, multiple theoretical approaches have been developed and applied to the study of IOs and their roles in the international community. As part of these diverse studies, the perception of IOs changes in accordance with developments in international relations. Refecting these different perspectives, scholars conceptualize IOs as either 'instruments', 'arenas', 'actors', 'bureaucracies' or 'resources' (e.g. Hurd 2011; Barkin 2006).

In the research on social policy, the attention to the role of IOs has emerged from studies on transition and developing countries. While in traditional welfare state research, the units of analysis used to be national contexts, actors, and institutions, most countries outside of a narrow 'OECD country' view developed forms of social protection with different kinds of transnational involvement. IOs have, for example, been identifed as important in designing schemes of social protection in Central and

1While the term IO has long been used for organizations founded by governments, the globalized turn in international relations also strengthened the interpretation of internationally operating and non-governmental organizations as being IOs. In this context, the term IGOs was introduced to distinguish governmental from non-governmental actors. Either way, the signifcance of providing a defnition of the type of organizations dealt with is immanent.

Eastern European countries in the 1990s. In development contexts, the impact of conditionalities on loans, as well as the promotion of specifc schemes of social protection (e.g. Conditional Cash Transfers) by IOs, has been subject to extensive research as well. Theoretical approaches combining different streams of theoretical literature for better capturing global social governance and the role of IOs within have been developed accordingly (Kaasch et al. 2019).

Contributions focusing on the role of specifc IOs in social policy include work on the World Bank (e.g. Ervik 2005; Vetterlein 2007) and the ILO (e.g. Deacon 2015), but also the OECD (e.g. Armingeon and Beyeler 2004; Deacon and Kaasch 2008; Mahon 2009) and the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the feld of global education policy (Lerch and Buckner 2018). What we learn from such contributions is that while each IO does come with a specifc, individual background, constitution, mandate, and working mode, they all coexist in contexts of mutual recognition, exchange, struggle, collaboration, and so on (e.g. Deacon 2007; Yeates 2008; Deacon 2013; Kaasch 2015; Kaasch and Martens 2015).

Moreover, it is hard to determine the value and quality of impact in a generalized way—even for one single IO—there are usually multiple messages and working mechanisms that play out differently. How do ideas and policies get diffused and how do norms get implemented? Considering different modes here, the World Bank for example can be the good guy (providing support for implementing social policies) or the bad guy (forcing states to introduce certain reforms) depending on what policy feld we look at. Similarly, looking 'inside' organizational structures, one OECD department can be identifed as producing more social ideas than another one, and both messages may be communicated simultaneously to the public. This also illustrates that IOs are not monolithic actors, but rather complex bureaucracies with possibly competing departments.

In addition, assessing the power of specifc working modes or means of communication is also diffcult. To be sure, there is comparatively little 'hard law' in global social policies, however, depending on the breadth of the concept, human rights law or international regulation may be part of the picture and there we may even fnd enforceable norms. Nevertheless, the only transnational context with something like a more comprehensive social policy is still the European Union (EU). The impact of the EU on social policy is mostly determined by its supranational legal framework in the free movement of labor and, to some extent, health services, as various contributions have shown (e.g. Ferrera 2005; Anderson 2015).

An important task remaining for research is to get a clearer picture of what qualifes as 'impact' or 'infuence'. For instance, Armingeon and Beyeler (2004) argued for the OECD that it has at best little infuence on national social policymaking. Orenstein (2003) and Müller (2003) instead found that the World Bank strongly infuenced the set-up of national pension systems. While the aim of this book is not to analyze the impact that IOs have on specifc national social policy reforms, the changing national discourses generated by global discourses, rankings by IOs, and hard law (e.g. as part of trade agreements) in some policy felds may have both direct and indirect implications and consequences for national social policymaking. Epistemic communities have been identifed as playing a role in several cases. By taking into account how discursive practices shape the understanding of policy goals and appropriate means, we show how IO infuence can be translated onto the state level.

#### Global Governance of Social Policy Fields

In understanding the meaning and impact of IOs from a horizontal perspective, the study of IOs is closely associated with concepts of global governance. For more than two decades, global governance has helped to frame the understanding of how political steering on the international level takes place and to what extent IOs can account for autonomous actions (Muldoon 2004; Mayntz 2008). As a system, global governance builds on normative principles and refexive authorities (Zürn 2018). The notion of global governance is important because, "the purpose of global governance no longer refects solely the interest of states but now also includes other actors" (Barnett and Sikkink 2008, 64). Following this aspect, territorial boundaries and national sovereignty cannot be taken for granted in contemporary policymaking (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006). This also holds true for the involvement of IOs in social issues, despite the general assumption that social issues are dominantly governed by national constituencies.

Thus, an enhanced understanding of political steering processes allows for analyzing mechanisms of governance detached from the state-centric perspective and includes additional, more comprehensive forms of governance. Furthermore, it entails a shift from states to a multiplicity of regulatory actors: from hard to soft law, from formal to informal rules (Mingst 1999, 93). This understanding of governance presents IOs (and other inter- and transnational actors) as having the ability to create, diffuse, and implement rules, norms, and (behavioral) standards through means of soft governance rather than through binding legislation understood as hard law (Abbott and Snidal 2000). In other words, IOs can "use institutional and discursive resources to induce deference from others" (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 5).

In this regard, the discursive actions of IOs become pivotal in the realm of global governance, given that the ways in which issues and problems are framed and perceived play an important role in infuencing policy outcomes. In this vein, IOs can become "knowledge brokers" (Niemann and Martens 2018). They defne social problems, provide answers to them, and distribute the solutions worldwide, often backed by academic research and empirical data. Thus, global social policy research is concerned with questions of who formulates and frames what kinds of ideas, goals, and rights on social protection (Deacon et al. 1997; Deacon 2007). Such kind of research also seeks to answer questions regarding how these processes take place and how they are 'communicated' to other levels of social policymaking (Béland and Orenstein 2013).

# Global Governance as IO Involvement in Social Policy Fields

For the purpose of this book, we study global social governance as the involvement of IOs in different felds of social policy. Concepts and theories vary though with regard to what forms part of social policy (or a 'welfare state'). Such concepts are often driven by the institutional arrangements of ideal types within welfare state regimes. Since the view has broadened so as to include low- and middle-income countries into welfare state analyses, the concept of what may form part of a system of social protection has also widened. Pension and unemployment care schemes usually relate to concepts of social insurance, while food, housing, or water are more about the provision of public goods. Health and care extend to both the provision of services and forms of social insurance against connected risks. Identifying vulnerable groups, such as children or disabled people, is another way of defning and organizing social policy felds. Moreover, when we look at eco-social policies, we can consider both a connection between policy felds, as well as how they may stand for a new form of welfare state conception. In the selection of contributions to this volume, we intend to exemplify several of such 'felds' without constraining ourselves to one specifc understanding of what forms a part of social policy, or one interpretation of how best to break social policy down into further policy felds.

With this approach, we are in line with the character and emergence of international law in relation to social issues and global development goals. The United Nation's International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights refers to fundamental human rights connected to labor, social security, health and care, and education. Many ILO Conventions, especially and most recently the Social Protection Floors Recommendation (R202), specify these social rights as well. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a further refection of the broad and multifold nature of social policy and social protection systems. At the same time, many of these instruments of global social policy also single out vulnerable groups for which they discuss and defne the specifc applications of social policies.

However, when studying the population of social policy IOs, theoretical streams of International Relations hold different factors accountable for IOs being engaged in the feld of social policy. A realists' interest in the activities of IOs is rather limited, as this perspective considers IOs to be institutions associated with refecting the political power structures between states (e.g. Hoffmann 1970; Mearsheimer 1994). The existence and eventual infuence of IOs would thus refect state decision-making in terms of national interest in power perpetuation. Informed by functionalism and rational choice theory, neo-institutionalism views IOs as entities created to manage interdependencies and facilitate cooperation among states (Keohane 1984; Zürn 1998; Keohane and Nye 1977). In this vein, it is argued that IOs are suitable for pooling the interests of different actors and may achieve better outcomes than if states were to act on their own (Martin and Simmons 1998; Weingast 2002). Following this line of thought, IOs should form once a goal that requires international cooperation is defned. They are sustained if the reason for cooperation persists or if the benefts for their involved members outweigh the costs. In any case, an IO's existence depends on the goodwill and preferences of states.

Other approaches to international relations grant IOs more autonomous actorhood. Neoliberalists try to balance IO autonomy and their responsiveness to the demands of member governments (Hawkins et al. 2006; Nielson and Tierney 2003). Thus, an IO's existence is affected by their agent relationship to the state principal. Consequently, it becomes costly for the principal to dissolve its agent once it is installed. According to assumptions of path dependency this cost increases the longer the IO exists and the more institutionalized it becomes. The work of constructivists and others have drawn attention to IOs' nature and the characteristics of their actorhood as well as to the activities of IOs as norm entrepreneurs who are able to infuence state behavior (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001; Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Finnemore 1993; Abbott and Snidal 1998). From this view, IOs are not mere instruments of states. Rather, IOs and their bureaucracies can develop a life of their own, including the defnition of new goals, structures, and modi operandi, eventually being able to infuence state behavior (Niemann 2012). Activities in social policy are therefore also within the hands of the IO itself and can even be dysfunctional to the initial tasks.

Our volume builds up on liberalist and constructivist work, as scholars of these theories emphasize the actorhood of IOs, though to different degrees. Such approaches are a helpful starting point for exploring IOs as important actors in global social governance. However, these classic IR theories are not yet suffcient for exploring what shapes the populations of IOs in a feld and the signifcance of the discourses they produce. Therefore, we complement our analytical framework with a theoretical heuristic, adapting Organizational Ecology and Soft Governance approaches for our purposes.

## Populations of IOs: Organizational Field and Institutional Design

In conceptualizing global social governance as a number of social felds, we are interested in mapping each feld according to the IOs active in it. How a feld is constituted and which IOs populate it is determined by exogenous and endogenous elements. The analytical approach of Organizational Ecology within the study of IR is loosely applied in this volume as a heuristic frame for this aspect of the analyses. It offers a theoretical lens for assessing the developments in the population of social policy IOs. This theoretical account, which stems from biology sciences and was adapted to the social sciences most prominently by Hannan and Freeman (1977, 1986, 1989), was recently revived by Abbott, Green, and Keohane (2016) for studying IOs.

Organizational Ecology is marked by two complementary approaches: *organizational environment* and *intrinsic features* (Abbott et al. 2016). The intrinsic features approach emphasizes endogenous factors of IOs to explain how IOs are capable of acting within a given institutional environment and what accounts for change. The organizational environment approach addresses how this institutional feld is composed and acknowledges external factors and externalities of the IOs' surroundings. Hence, combining both could be seen as a promising analytical tool for developing a framework for examining developments and changes in the realm of (social policy) IOs. Thus, from the perspective of organizational ecology, one focuses on both the constitutive features of the organizational feld and the characteristics of IOs within this feld. In addition, the theoretical view of organizational ecology with its focus on constraining and enabling environmental variables is seen as compatible with actor-centered approaches, which can offer more detailed explanations on how IOs respond to imposed external constraints and opportunities (Abbott et al. 2016, 272–273).

#### *Organizational Field: Topography of IOs*

Organizational environment is related to the sociological concept of an 'organizational feld' and refers to what we call topography. Thus, the topography of an organizational feld comprises underlying characteristics of the feld itself, the density of relevant actors in that feld and their relationship to each other. This concept, also widely used in political science and international relations, marks the aggregate of actors that constitute the institutional environment.

The characteristics of an organizational feld further include the rules and belief systems, as well as the relational networks that arise in the broader societal context (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Scott 1983). In this approach, the environment, which IOs cannot control, is seen as shaping the opportunities for their development and actions. In sum, IO behavior and interactions with others is shaped by the feld's topography.

The organizational environment emphasizes that adaptation to the environment determines the opportunities and scope of action of an IO. Thus, a population is marked by its degree of diversity. This means that in a highly diverse feld, organizations can populate different niches within a community. Also, the density of a population has to be taken into account when analyzing an organizational feld. For instance, the concept of isomorphism emphasizes how organizations act in a highly elaborated environment in which they become more alike in order to gain legitimacy and ultimately increase their impact (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 352).

This means that for an IO in social policy, the ability to shape discourse in a feld is impacted by the number and power of competing, cooperating, and coexisting actors. If many actors hold the same beliefs and ideas, they can form coherent epistemic communities and put forward their claims and positions more easily in a partnership. Accordingly, a homogenous community could generate more leverage to infuence other actors (e.g. domestic governments or other organizational felds). In contrast, if IOs face competition with other IOs (or other actors), they may lose out to those with stronger positions. IOs may also populate and cultivate a niche in some social policy issues and coexist without disturbing the vital interests of states or other IOs. When IOs populate a niche in a population, an important issue in this context is often the question of expertise (Ness and Brechin 1988; Jonsson 1986), which could apply to regionally active IOs that address specifcities.

#### *Institutional Design: Intrinsic Features of IOs*

While the organizational environment approach focuses on the interaction between IOs and their environment, the concept of intrinsic features emphasizes how the institutional design of IOs shapes their behavior and determines how autonomous IOs can act in an organizational feld. On the one hand, it fnds support in rational choice concepts, such as the principal-agent model (Hawkins et al. 2006; Nielson and Tierney 2003), which implies that the designers of IOs can actively infuence the scope of possible actions of an IO. On the other hand, this approach is also congruent with approaches based on path dependency theories of historical institutionalism, as they explain why initial choices may have long-term effects on the future of the organizational development (North 1990; Pierson 2004).2

<sup>2</sup>This is in line with one early observation by Stinchcombe (1965), who argues that organizations incorporate and preserve institutional characteristics that are fashionable or legitimate during the period in which they were founded. Intrinsic features also relate to theorists who have documented how public organizations reinvent their original missions and tailor their appearance to placate and please external stakeholders (Boin et al. 2010, 402).

One important issue in this regard concerns the institutional design of membership rules (Koremenos et al. 2001, 763). Membership in IOs is usually distinguished as either universal or restricted (Rittberger et al. 2012, 7–9; Jacobson 1984, 12). Thus, it can be assumed that IOs that are potentially open to all states feature different discursive patterns than IOs with restricted membership. Moreover, if an IO has many different member states with different interests and preferences, this heterogeneity makes it more diffcult to fnd a commonly accepted framing of an issue at stake. On the other hand, once the frame is set, its moral authority is high.

Another important aspect regarding the institutional design of IOs is the scope of issues covered (Koremenos et al. 2001). In IO research, two notions are commonly distinguished, namely comprehensive and policyspecifc concerns of IOs (Lenz et al. 2015). IOs with comprehensive scopes deal with more issue areas than those with specifc policy concerns. Hence, comprehensive IOs could link issues of social policy with other topics in their portfolio, for instance economics or the environment. IOs with more than one policy feld usually have to fnd an overarching world view which is implicitly refected in the IO's discursive approach in all policy felds it is dealing with.

Understanding IOs (and particularly IO secretariats) as complex bureaucracies entails some important implications for the discourse characteristics of IOs. As has been shown, the analysis of IOs as bureaucracies must also take into consideration the internal IO procedures, rules, and mechanisms (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). These infuence how fexible an IO is in terms of dealing with changing external situations. In the context of studying the discourses of IOs in social policy, this means that the organization of IO bureaucracies infuences how the discursive culture of IOs is institutionally constituted. These factors provide a framework for deliberations within IOs and shape the scope of discussions.

## Discourses of IOs: Cognitive Authority and Soft Governance

As a second step, we are interested in the discourses which take place within and between IOs in different social policy felds. The organizational environment, characterized by the degree of density, diversity, and interaction between IOs as well as the institutional design of an IO, which includes its scope of membership and the structure of its bureaucracy, provide an analytical framework for analyzing how IOs are infuenced by each other in terms of what they can do and how they can interact. However, the analysis of their discourses provides insights on what ideas, policies, and leitmotifs they promote both regionally and globally in their feld about a particular social policy. This allows us to assess how their views on social policies have evolved and whether we can observe isomorphic tendencies regarding ideas.

The importance of discourses from an International Relations' point of view is usually associated with social constructivism, as it offers explanatory strength in assessing IO governance capabilities. Discourses, in this sense, are understood in this volume as strategical discourse promoted by individual or collective actors, and not as structural components which constrain activity. Central to this perspective is the role of IOs and their ability to gain autonomy and authority as actors. Often equipped to set agendas, prepare and shape decisions, or foster implementation, IOs are thus more than the sum of their member states' interests (Koremenos et al. 2001).

In particular, in a highly complex feld where knowledge is considered a key resource, IOs make themselves irreplaceable in terms of providing information to their members that is otherwise not available (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, Martens and Jakobi 2010b). In the absence of command and control, IOs can make use of their ability to produce information and knowledge to generate infuence (Conzelmann 2008, 44). Unlike hard or coercive mechanisms of governance, such soft governance cannot be equated with traditional hierarchical steering, but rather with epistemic knowledge (Haas 1992). What is important in this line of thought is that IOs need to be accepted as cognitive authorities on discursive governance and discursively provide a set of coherent ideas for policy solutions.

#### *Cognitive Authority: Legitimacy and Reputation of IOs*

IO soft governance implies that although IOs are set up by states and consist of state delegates, they are able to develop their own preferences and ideas because of intra-organizational networks and interactions that cannot be fully controlled by any principals (Hawkins et al. 2006). Despite the provision of a clear mandate on how to act, IOs can go beyond their previously defned roles and generate new aims that exceed their initial purpose and scope. With time, IOs may even embrace policy positions that are at odds with the interest of their founders, thereby exerting infuence back onto their member states and beyond, given the potential for agency slack (Koenig-Archibugi 2006). This may be accomplished when IOs, or more specifcally their bodies (e.g. secretariats, departments, and working groups), develop idiosyncratic discourses and generate their own ways of framing an issue. Instead of simply carrying out what their member states urge them to do, IOs become policy entrepreneurs.

In this context, an IO needs to be accepted as a *cognitive authority* in the given policy feld (Broome and Seabrooke 2012, 2015) in order to shape a given discourse. The authority of an actor lacking coercive powers is strongly linked to the aspect of legitimacy. An indicator of an IO's legitimacy is its reputation. IOs with a 'good' reputation (i.e. a reputation for being rational and impartial) are accepted as legitimate sources of advice largely due to the fact that they exhibit apolitical and technocratic expertise (Barnett 2002, 113; Sharman 2007; Meyer and Rowan 1977). The perceived legitimacy of an IO leads others to follow its recommendations.

The ability to shape how to think about something is central in understanding soft governance by discursive means. Since IOs utilizing soft governance rely on their function as advisors and opinion leaders, one key element is the role and dissemination of ideas. The central argument in this respect is that the proliferation of ideas and ideational change in turn promote policy change. Ideas serve as a cognitive framework for interpreting an issue, identifying something as a problem, and rendering suitable solution strategies (Martens and Jakobi 2010a). Thus, both the social creation of common knowledge as a standard in a policy feld and the role of IOs in shaping international discourse are essential for soft governance (Abbott and Snidal 1998). In the case of social policies, this means that ideas IOs create and promote about social policies serve as "cognitive flters through which actors come to […] conceive of their own interests" (Hay 2011, 69).

This takes place in a discursive process. First, ideas shape the defnition of an issue as a problem. In this regard, the reinterpretation of a policy in the light of a new idea reveals that something needs to be changed. This means that IOs frst create common shared knowledge by providing information which was otherwise not accessible. The collected data is then interpreted against the background of views and ideas within the IO. Pure information is transformed into substantial knowledge (Barnett and Finnemore 2004).

Second, by identifying something as problematic, ideas can also indicate goals (i.e. a more desirable policy). The SDGs are a current and prominent example. They address global challenges in various social policy felds, interconnect them, and defne targets to be achieved. It is deemed essential to back arguments with empirical evidence, as they must be proved to be conclusive and sound.

Third, suitable means for accomplishing the new goals are communicated through ideas. This "meditative mode" of soft IO governance addresses direct contributions to the policy discourse (Mahon and McBride 2008). IOs make recommendations to their members on the basis of publicized information and fndings about best practices in a certain policy feld and consequently lobby for them (Martens and Jakobi 2010a). This lobbying can take different forms, such as recommendations which illustrate directly how to act in a policy feld, for instance. More indirectly, recommendations can also emphasize the behavior of a peer actor in order to serve as a blueprint.

#### *Soft Governance: IOs as Broadcasters of Ideas and Policies*

Ideas are not just tools in the hands of strategic actors (Lieberman 2002, 699), they need agents to be disseminated in a discursive process. IOs act as these disseminators or broadcasters of ideas (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006, 17) and aim to "nurture people's identities, helping them to construct their fundamental values which, in turn, shapes their beliefs and interests" (Béland and Cox 2011, 9). IOs help to defne what stakeholders want and provide them with the justifcation for why they want something.

By discursively constraining the frame of appropriate behavior, IOs are able to infuence others, be it national governments or other actors in the international sphere, because they possess the authority to create social reality (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 2005). IOs aim to frame a common understanding of the issue at stake and defne goals for policymaking by increasing or decreasing the legitimacy of a certain norm, policy, or action (Nay 2014).

Interesting questions in this regard are about whether the nature of the discourse is normatively constituted or whether it focus on strategic behavior and technical aspects. Who is participating in these discourses? Can we observe different discursive frames competing within single IOs or between IOs? Why does one prevail? Or do different IOs within a social policy feld hold different discursive frames and compete with each other?

By virtue of the promoted leitmotifs or guiding principles, IOs can set how the discourse of a topic is defned, shaped, and promoted. IOs set standards against which national policies can be evaluated and create normative pressures for the national context of policymaking (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). They form opinions which stimulate and inspire national discourses in politics, the public, and in the media. In other words, shaping discourses is a form of soft governance.

#### Structure of the Book

Taken together, this volume seeks to fll a major gap on IO social governance. The chapters in this book have *two purposes*. On the one hand, they shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs. They explore how a particular social policy feld is constituted and which major or dominant IOs are setting the trends. On the other hand, the contributions examine the *discourses* these IOs promote in 'their' feld by exploring and analyzing the ideas and leitmotifs they produce. By exploring the trajectories IOs set and spread, the chapters in this book provide novel knowledge about the architecture of arguments in global social governance. In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the volume contains three parts and each part contains four chapters.

This introduction provides a systematic theoretical approach to examining IOs in global social policy. It lays out in broad strokes the knowledge about their purposes, functions, and characteristics in general, and their involvement in social policy issues in particular. Complementing liberal and constructivist IR theories, the introduction lays out organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for the analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance.

Part II deals with *labor and migration* issues. The following Chap. 2 by *Fergusson* addresses the ways IOs have responded to youth unemployment as an important and distinctive policy feld by tracing the historical context of multiple IOs' engagements. It also gives particular attention to the evolving relationship between the ILO and the World Bank as well as their construction of, and withdrawal from, partnerships that variously facilitated and limited the pursuit of their respective strategies and goals for alleviating youth unemployment. By analyzing the policy discourses of both IOs, it fnds externally facing partnerships were established as they better refect distinctive ILO and World Bank priorities. In Chap. 3, *Römer*, *Henninger*, and *Dung* compare how three international and two regional organizations, namely the ILO, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), approach the global governance of labor standards. They argue that two main discourses have been pursued in the global debate, a 'social' discourse, and a 'neoliberal' discourse, and they fnd that IOs whose intrinsic features allow for an institutionalized representation of workers' interests pursue variations of the social discourse, whereas those that do not stay closer to a neoliberal position. Furthermore, they show that the coexistence of these two conficting discourses has led to contestation, but also to exchange and cooperation. In Chap. 4, *Yeates* and *Pillinger* offer a historical development of health care worker migration as a global social policy feld in which distinct felds of care and migration overlap. They emphasize the pluralistic and dynamic nature of the feld, and the role of contestation, cooperation, and coordination in the unfolding of global policy in order to better understand the origins of this feld and its key characteristics. Chapter 5 on the global social governance of pensions by *Heneghan* analyzes the way in which IOs have competed to shape the pensions discourse. It shows how the organizational feld has been shaped by the dominant economic paradigm, which has created space for IOs to operate in the policy area. It also fnds that the intrinsic features of each IO active in the pension reform arena determine its approach to infuencing the pensions discourse and its response to rivals entering the feld.

Part III deals with issues concerning *family and education*. Chapter 6 by *Holzscheiter* traces the history of children's rights as a distinct sphere in international law from the frst recognition of the special status of children, to adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to the growth of the contemporary complex IO landscape. Children's rights enjoy growing visibility and relevance, and continue to be a cross-cutting issue in international organizations of all kinds, making them a central dimension of global social governance; nonetheless international norms and measures surrounding children's rights continue to be challenged and questioned by scholars and practitioners alike. This contestation is also refected in the discourse within the population of IOs. In Chap. 7, *Niemann* and *Martens* map the population of education IOs to describe what types of IOs deal with education and to identify different clusters of IOs. Moreover, the ideas IOs hold regarding education are analyzed and show how the discourse on education has developed over time within the population of IOs. They show that IOs' ideas about the purpose of education converged over time and that IOs became more holistic with regard to the leitmotifs they hold. In Chap. 8, *Mahon* identifes that from the 1990s to 2008, the family policy feld was bifurcated between the North and the South, whereby the former followed the shift from the male breadwinner to the adult earner family with its work-family tensions as promoted by the ILO and the OECD, and the latter focused on policies targeting children in poor families and had UNICEF and the World Bank clearly playing an important role on the ground. Since the 2008 crisis, the feld has come together through the Sustainable Development Goals which simultaneously address both North and South. Chapter 9 by *Schuster* and *Kolleck* deals with disability as a global social policy issue since the shift in conceptualization from a medical to a social perspective. It identifes infuential actors, relates them to the main discourses, and maps their relations by using network analysis.

Part IV deals with *health and environment*. In Chap. 10, *Kaasch* focuses on four key IOs involved in global social policy in the feld of health care systems. She traces their roles and relationships over time and argues that the architecture has been increasingly characterized by collaboration around key concepts such as Universal Health Coverage (UHC). In the current COVID-19 response, however, preliminary fndings suggest a shift back to original mandates. In Chap. 11, *Lakeman* deals with climate change as a global social challenge. The chapter highlights the temporal shift toward the current understanding of climate change as a pervasive threat to social policy writ large at the IO level across various issue areas. Climate change as a compounding issue has led to compelling developments regarding the roles of IOs as actors of soft governance, which this chapter illustrates via the example of climate insurance. In Chap. 12, *Schmidt* looks at water as a feld of global social policy concern. The chapter provides the historical context for understanding how international organizations developed a distinctly global orientation to water policy alongside the emergence of global hydrology. Water security is now central to how international organizations frame and respond to risks affecting interconnected environmental and economic systems. In Chap. 13, *Wolkenhauer* examines the policies of IOs in the Governance of Food. Despite having been on the global (social) policy agenda since the beginning of the previous century, hunger and undernourishment have not been resolved to this day. The chapter traces discursive and institutional shifts and shows how, after an initial focus on smallholder agriculture, IOs' focus shifted from production to consumption. Coupled with an overly optimistic trust in the market, they have thus been as much part of the problem as they might still become part of the solution.

The concluding Chap. 14 by *Martens*, *Niemann*, and *Kaasch* resumes the arguments made in the introduction to this volume. It summarizes the empirical fndings of the individual contributions and highlights prevailing cross-cutting issues and themes. Overall, it becomes evident that IOs have been part of the architecture of arguments in global social governance for a long time: They have been populating diverse social felds in which they more often cooperate or coexist in issue-related or individual regional niches than contest each other. IOs have also proven strong in exercising soft governance as the broadcasters of new ideas, having cognitive authority over their specifc feld. The chapter closes by formulating avenues for further research.

#### References

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# Labor and Migration

# International Organizations' Involvement in Youth Unemployment as a Global Policy Field, and the Global Financial Crisis

### *Ross Fergusson*

#### Introduction

Youth employment and unemployment are only recently becoming recognized as a distinctive feld of global and transnational policy. In the last two decades, several key texts have greatly deepened our understanding of International Organizations' (IOs) centrality to the governance of global social policy (notably Deacon 1997, 2007; Deacon et al. 2003; O'Brien 2014; Yeates 2000, 2014; Kaasch and Martens 2015). While all address labor or employment policy, in comparison there has been little or no analysis of global social policy actors' engagement with unemployment in relation to young people— predominantly the most vulnerable unemployment demographic in recently transformed labor markets. General interest in this policy feld burgeoned in the years following the Global Financial

R. Fergusson (\*)

Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 31

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_2

Crisis (GFC), but it has lacked the analytical and scholarly attention to global policy afforded to other felds represented in this volume.1 As a result, understanding of how the global governance of youth (un)employment has evolved and functioned as a policy feld remains comparatively limited.

This oversight could not be attributed to the short histories of IOs' activities. By far the most prominent IO in the feld, the International Labour Organization (ILO) recently celebrated the centennial of its establishment under the Covenant of the League of Nations, set up by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to address the aftermath of World War I. The ILO's founding remit included labor relations and supply, the prevention of unemployment and other identifed concerns including the protection of young people, children and women in labor markets. The only other IO of comparable historical standing, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now referred to as the World Bank (WB), was also part of an international response to catastrophic global social confict—established as one of the Bretton Woods institutions of 1944 to prevent the recurrence of major uneven development as a widely recognized cause of World War II.

Despite the longevity and global reach and scale of the ILO and the IBRD/WB, their work and that of the many other IOs and the international partnerships they have initiated, it is only recently that youth unemployment (YU) is becoming collectively interpreted and analyzed as a distinctive global policy feld. Perhaps more than any other single factor, it was the rapid spread of mass YU in many countries at unprecedented levels during and after the GFC that prompted international recognition of the fact that YU is a global issue and a global policy feld worthy of globalist modes of analysis—most notably because of its intergenerational signifcance and its impacts on international labor migration and international tensions (Fergusson and Yeates 2014).

To set the contemporary context of these developments, some 'headline' data is necessary.2 Most recently, 'headcounts' of unemployed young people aged 15–24 years recorded by the ILO have been consistently

2Unless otherwise stated, all YU data hereafter is drawn from ILO data to 2018 (https:// www.ilo.org/wesodata).

<sup>1</sup>Eichhorst and Rinne (2015), for example, estimate that by 2014, 730 youth employment projects were under way in 110 countries, initiated by IOs and the international development programs of advanced economies.

between 11% and 12% (1999–2019) of the labor force, peaking at 77 million worldwide in 2009, falling back to 70 million in 2015, and then rising slightly but steadily to a projected 71 million in 2018. These data are undoubtedly signifcant under-counts.3 Numerically, 71% of the young people who were unemployed at the peak level in 2009 were male, 29% were female. In addition, if the category 'unemployed' is expanded to include all young people aged 15–24 years who are Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), this more inclusive defnition of nonparticipation in labor markets rises to 22%. Some data suggest that actual levels of 'registered' plus undeclared non-participation probably take the total of young people who are NEET to 130 million. If in-work poverty is included, 40% of under-25s worldwide are workless or poor (UN-ECOSOC 2016).

Rates of unemployment vary dramatically between countries and between regions. The weighted 27-year average YU rates to 2017 range between less than 5% (in ten African and Asian countries) and more than 40% (fve African and three European countries). In Northern Africa, YU rates have fuctuated in the 25–35% range since 1991; in Eastern Europe the range is 15–25%; in Central and Western Asia 13–20%; in Latin America and the Caribbean 10–20%. Almost all regions have seen signifcant increases in these rates toward the upper range since the onset of the GFC. In South-East Asia and the Pacifc fve young people are unemployed for every unemployed adult.4

At these scales, for any age-range, persistently high unemployment at any spatial level cannot be construed as an economic policy problem alone: for young people, it is an acute problem for *social* policy. The dependency of many teenagers on their parents and other adults, the vulnerability of all young people to multiple forms of exploitation, and the harms and risks of extended periods of exclusion from labor markets and economic participation are all at high risk of becoming realized as problems of and for social policy that span multiple sectors (education, health, housing, social security) and require 'whole-society' approaches for their resolution.

Wherever possible, this chapter focuses on statutory instruments using the governance capacities of IOs. In view of the multiplicity of actors, the

<sup>3</sup> See Bardhan (1978) and Beneria (1981) on the longstanding challenges of estimating unemployment levels.

<sup>4</sup>Fergusson and Yeates (2021) provide a full analysis of the depth, extent and distribution of endemic YU.

ILO's longevity as an IO, and the many forms taken by other transnational and global actors, it is necessary to concentrate analysis throughout the chapter on the ILO and WB as the two key IO actors and on the partnerships they established. Particular attention is given to the various formations these IOs constitute, and the trajectories, confgurations and processes which the evolution of their partnerships has entailed. This focus emphasizes the coexistence and contestation of the ILO and WB, and the modes of mutual engagement, cooperation and collaboration between them.

As Niemann et al. (see introduction to this volume) argue, individual IOs function in contexts of coexistence, mutual recognition, cooperation, exchange, collaboration, but also in contexts of competition, contestation, struggle and confict. The overarching predominance of the ILO and the WB and their partnerships epitomize these forms of coexistence. These themes should not be construed either as typical or as defning the landscape of IO actor participation in framing and embedding social policy across this feld. Rather, what follows is intended to extend and diversify understanding of the forms of global social governance analyzed in this volume.

# Mapping the IO 'Population' and Discourses

Six key IOs populate this policy feld. They are signifcantly differentiated by the depth, extent and timeframes of their involvement. Perhaps predictably, the history of their engagement is a strong indicator of IOs' respective signifcances as effective actors: Table 2.1 indicates their infuence on YU policy globally, as well as their year of frst intervention.

#### *Dominant Actors: The Policy Discourses of the ILO and World Bank*

The ILO and WB have jointly established themselves as transnational authorities setting principles and standards and diffusing rules, norms and key resources in the policy feld of youth (un)employment. As normentrepreneurs, in very different ways, they have identifed, defned and constituted YU as a policy feld, a social problem (ILO) and an economic problem (WB), assuming leading roles in producing information. Their policy discourses establish the prevailing normative and ideational

**Table 2.1** IOs in the youth unemployment policy feld: earliest interventions

foundations of the feld, and the ILO's and WB's status as leading 'soft governance' actors.

As well as being by far the longest-standing IO, the ILO has had the most extensive engagement with youth employment and unemployment. Established in 1919 with a constitution committed to international social justice and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969, the ILO stands as an IO of unrivaled stature in the setting of international labor standards and promoting employment rights. Many of its Conventions and Recommendations bear directly on these issues with respect to YU. The ILO's interventions across the range of conventions with statutory powers, recommendations, local projects and an extensive presence on the ground across several world regions make it the pre-eminent IO globally in the feld of (un)employment. The ILO works closely and interactively with other UN bodies and civil society organizations, national governments and in partnerships.

From its inception, the ILO's discourse was focused on the need for concerted action to address the international causes of unemployment. Early work set out international norms governing young people's relationship to work and education by means of Conventions and Recommendations. Between 1919 and 2002, 48 such instruments relating to children/young people and work were crucial to the construction of this transnational policy feld. For example, key instruments concerning YU during the interwar period ensured conditional fnancial support to the involuntarily unemployed, disputed economic theory that advocated wage reductions as a means of remedying unemployment, and stipulated compulsory general and vocational educational provision for all up to the age of 18. Many instruments have since been updated.

Since 2000, the ILO's YU policy discourse has been shaped by its Decent Work and Global Employment agendas. It has emphasized securing increases in aggregate demand for young people's labor, including by means of job creation and institutional labor market reforms, but has also advocated active labor market policies (ALMPs), selective employment incentives and supply-side labor market measures. The ILO's commitment to unemployment-related welfare benefts for young people is embedded in its discourse of 'social protection foors' that include basic income security across the life cycle. In the wake of the GFC, ILO discourse has urged member states to increase demand for young people's labor in response to 'jobless growth' and inadequate unemployment protection, while also developing more business-friendly discourses, including partnership-based entrepreneurial solutions. ILO discourses in this policy feld have recently manifested increasing tensions, reconfguring its labor market analyses and unemployment policies to concede to some neoliberal agendas, while continuing to reassert its historical commitments to international social protection and labor standards.5

In parallel with the ILO's post-WWII initiatives, the UN and IBRD were active in this feld. A key UN report cites the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights' commitment to "the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment" (Article 23). The Charter of the UN pursued the threefold UN goal for "higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development"

<sup>5</sup> See Fergusson and Yeates (2013, 2014) for detailed analyses of the policy discourses of all IOs reviewed here.

(Article 55). The UN also called upon the IBRD to borrow from and lend to governments to facilitate full employment. While this remit drove a signifcant element of IBRD discourse throughout the following decades, its focus did not specifcally include youth employment until the WB responded to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000. In collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the ILO, the WB set up the Youth Employment Network (YEN) at the 2000 Millennium Summit. The WB's frst leading intervention on YU followed several years later, instigating the Global Partnership for Youth Employment (GPYE) in 2008.

During the pre-GFC period the WB's interventions were largely confned to published policy positions, the discourses of which emphasized young people's insuffcient or ill-matched labor market skills as a signifcant cause of YU. These discourses provided the rationale for the WB's criticism of regulated wages for young people, observing that YU rates are lowest in low-income countries, and implicitly associating this with minimal or absent minimum wage rates for young people in such economies. WB discourse also tended to attribute endemic high rates of YU to demographic bulges such that young people who could not be accommodated in labor markets should be assigned to extended schooling or vocational training.6

Two related themes connect these discourses. They are grounded in human capital theory, and all focus on supply-side interpretations of high levels of YU. As a result, WB policy advocacy has leaned strongly toward more effective job-search training, internships and measures to 'smooth' transitions into youth labor markets. However, as evidence accumulated of the prolonged effects of the GFC on YU rates (especially in Northern Africa, and also in parts of Europe in 2012–15), WB discourse adjusted, beginning with growing recognition of the damage to human development of mass YU, its costs and its effects on public perceptions of (in) equality and social justice. The WB's recognition of multiple shortcomings of YU programs that focused on the supply-side 'defciencies' of young labor market entrants followed. Further awareness of the high socio-economic risks of endemic mass YU (especially in politically volatile regions) intensifed WB policy shifts. In parallel, the WB's earlier antiwelfare discourses abated and prompted the need to reconsider the

<sup>6</sup> See World Bank (2006, 2011, 2012); Fergusson and Yeates (2013). For a defnition of endemic YU see Fergusson and Yeates (2021).

boundaries of welfare, causing recognition of the need for conditional support to gain ground.7

The WB's shifts in its analyses and prognoses coincided with corresponding obverse shifts in the ILO's positions, as noted above, toward some degree of convergence—thereby apparently creating the conditions for more effective dialogue and collaboration between them (see below).

#### *Other Signifcant Actors: UNESCO's and OECD's Policy Discourses*

From the earliest years of the UN, the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) maintained an important role in shaping YU discourse as inseparable from issues of educational participation. UNESCO worked closely with the ILO and IBRD on child labor, statutory age of admission to employment and compulsory education enforcement plans (UNESCO 1951, annex II: 17). A powerful, socially progressive, discursive dynamic between UNESCO and the ILO maintained strong pro-schooling advocacy, whereby the case for reducing YU became bound to the case for raising the school-leaving age. Before the GFC, UNESCO discourse stressed the particular exposure of young people to the risks of economic globalization, insecure jobs, involuntarily delayed labor market entry and prolonged unemployment/underemployment (UNESCO 2004, 5). Since the GFC it has led EU-funded programs in Mediterranean Northern Africa and Western Asia. Throughout, UNESCO discourse stressed unreliable and intermittent demand for young people's labor and avoided discourses that allege poor skills and capabilities as causes of YU.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been continuously active in this policy feld. Its annual *Employment Outlook* Reports consistently address YU through in-depth multi-country strategic analyses of YU which provide extensive survey data and intensive analysis of policy effectiveness (OECD 2004–11)*.* OECD discourses were consonant with those of the WB. They were informed by human capital theory and focused on labor market supplyside defciencies and the reportedly ill-adapted skills of school-leavers and disincentivizing welfare programs. The GFC bore especially heavily on almost all OECD member states, triggering adjustments to OECD

<sup>7</sup> See World Bank (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).

discourse. Defcient demand for young workers became temporarily recognized as a key driver of escalating YU, and advocacy of welfare 'safety nets' for previously ineligible younger age-groups with little or no access to unemployment benefts strengthened (OECD 2010a, b, 2011a, b). Gradually, however, as continuing high YU rates were apparently becoming normalized, OECD discourse returned to young people's alleged skills defcits and the fscally detrimental effects of subsistence-suffcient welfare benefts (OECD 2012–15). The OECD's policy discourses on YU were unusually fexible over time, while also consistently defaulting to archetypal neoliberal positions, interspersed with sporadic more social democratic leanings.

#### *Recent Entrants: UNICEF's and IMF's Policy Discourses*

Two less prominent IOs warrant recognition here. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund's (UNICEF) statutory focus remains on the welfare of children and young people up to age 18 under the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and on fghting child labor wherever appropriate. Over the long run its principal trajectory of engagement with young people's employment has been to promote and facilitate skills-related and employability programs in lower-income countries, typifed by its current Generation Unlimited project supporting young people and extending its upper age-range to 24 (UNICEF 2005, 2010).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was a late entrant to the feld. Its interventions followed escalating YU rates during the GFC. Unprecedently, the IMF's Managing Director shared public international platforms with the Director-General of the ILO, promoting discourses of social protection and labor market intervention, identifying unemployment insurance for young people as cost-effective for sustaining consumer demand, and advocating job subsidies to avoid redundancies.8

Neither UNICEF nor the IMF claim signifcance as defning discursive actors in this feld. They are nonetheless shapers of discourses and norm-entrepreneurs in other felds, and their counter-stereotypical policy positions on YU are surprising. As a leading UN program, unaccountably, UNICEF seems to overlook the well-being of young people

<sup>8</sup>These events took place at major international conferences in Oslo (2010) and Vienna (2011).

aged 15+ and the threats to their economic and social security. Conversely, as a key Bretton Woods IO, the IMF has displayed unexpected concern for this age-group, advocating extension of social protection and job creation in the wake of the GFC and allocating major fnancial support to mitigate extremely high levels of YU in Northern Africa (although this appears not to be a continuous programmed intervention).

The policy discourses of these two least-infuential IOs do not align well with the pro-social predispositions of UN bodies, or the pro-business predispositions of the WB and OECD. This provides a salutary reminder that the discourses and priorities of UNESCO and the OECD in this feld cannot be 'read off' from their other more prominent discourses in other policy felds. It also demonstrates an ebb and fow of policy ideas and norms within IOs, which indicates ephemeral context-specifc pragmatic adaptation at one extreme, or deep-rooted internal dissent at another. It is therefore salutary throughout to recall Niemann et al.'s comment (see introduction to this volume) that IOs are not monolithic discursive actors, but complex bureaucracies that experience and contain ongoing multiple sources of contestation within their organizations.

# Partnerships and IOs: Disseminating Knowledge, Ideas and Discourses

The most immediate recipients of IOs' knowledge, ideas and discourses in this policy feld have been the partnerships they construct and shape as deliberate disseminators of norms and policies. It is in and through partnership that IOs have exchanged knowledge and ideas and achieved mutual recognition, sometimes leading to cooperation and collaboration in pooling resources and leveraging partners. Partnership between worldleading IOs with major resources of expertise and fnance and extensive geographical and political reach offers great potential for effective intervention, while also posing considerable risks of dissent and contestation. In practice the only IOs that make continuing direct interventions in the form of specifc employment projects worldwide have been the ILO and WB. Each has its own extensive network of offces worldwide, some of which commission and fund projects in places of perceived signifcant need according to immediate contingencies.9 Many such projects are

<sup>9</sup> In the early 2000s, the ILO already had in place a uniquely extensive global network of up to 60 Country Offces, in Africa (14), Asia/Pacifc (14), Europe and Central Asia (9), and

bespoke and not necessarily part of the strategic international programs that seek to spread the priorities, knowledge and ideas IOs generate and strive to embed in national economic, employment, social and other practices. Most programs take the form of partnerships, and all but one have at least nominally been established as partnerships between the ILO and WB—typically along with one or more additional partners.

It is important to be aware of the political-economic contexts in which such partnerships evolved. Unsurprisingly, given their historical purposes, remits and priorities, the ILO and WB have extensive and sometimes contested histories regarding their political, social, and economic positions and contributions. These are captured in an academic literature too extensive to recall here.10 Very briefy summarized, one key marker of their eventual divergence and contestation can be traced back to the 1980s–90s, when the dominance of the Post-WWII UN agencies came under challenge from the Washington Consensus in response to growing international debt and the perceived need for 'structural adjustment' (particularly as a condition of WB/IMF loans), often taking the form of overt politicaleconomic attacks on social democratic values in favor of free-market and neoliberal policies. The changing political economy of global policymaking in this period challenged and partially marginalized the authority of the UN and its constituent organizations, including the ILO and its work in the feld of global (un)employment. The ILO came under strong pressure to accept more fexible employment contracts and relationships, for example. It subsequently responded with a Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, which pledged all ILO states to uphold four 'core' labor standards, including the abolition of child labor (reiterated in 2002 through the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (ILO 2004)).11 These initiatives reasserted the ILO's standing as a norm-generating institution—although they did not extend labor rights or strengthen the enforcement of existing labor standards, and they de-emphasized statutory instruments on rights and standards in favor of

representatives in 20 more lead countries in Asia, Middle East, South America, Caribbean, Eastern Europe. The WB has in excess of 100 Country Offces that have much more diverse functions, of which tackling YU is a minor element compared to the ILO's focused network at that time.

<sup>11</sup> https://www.ilo.org/declaration/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed February 25, 2020.

<sup>10</sup>For example, Ghébali et al. (1989); Wallerstein (2000); Dale and Robertson (2007); Deacon (2007, 2013, 2015); Standing (2008).

weaker instruments such as recommendations and codes of practice. In return—and as 'ascendant' IOs in the political-economic reconfguration of this period—the WB (and IMF) took steps to 'regularize' their relationship with trade unions (without formalizing them), while continuing to support modes of economic development 'free' from labor regulation.12

These observations set the work of the most politically and fnancially engaged IOs in an altered context. The evolving development of ILO instruments alone graphically depicts its surging capacity as an agent of the global governance of social and labor policy. The great advances occurred in the decades following both World Wars, between 1919 and 1965. The countervailing watershed moment in the YU policy feld was an active retreat from the values of the post-war settlement less than two decades later, making way for the period of unprecedented intensive neoliberalization outlined above, heavily promoted by the WB and IMF. The language and values of the post-war settlement were substantially over-written by IOs that extolled competition, reward of enterprise and the claimed economic and social benefts of deregulated markets in goods, services and labor. While these changes expressed themselves in complex, nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways throughout and beyond the 1980s–90s, they conditioned the practices and ambitions of many IOs and the relations between them—few more so than the ILO and WB, their work in the YU policy feld and their respective mutual propensities to cooperate, coexist, diverge and later eventually to separate and create very different partnerships.

#### *Collaboration, Cooperation, Separation: Endogenous Partnership*

Inter-IO partnerships concerning YU have been a principal means by which IOs in this feld have collaborated formally. The frst of three ILO-WB partnerships in the cause of addressing extreme YU levels was the product of the 2000 Millennium Summit in New York. The YEN which resulted was described as a global platform to prioritize youth employment and exchange policies and programs to improve employment opportunities for youth. YEN was an archetypal semi-endogenous

<sup>12</sup>For example, the WB integrated core labor standards into some of its health-related contracts (see Yeates and Pillinger 2019). More generally, for a fuller account of tensions and advances in ILO-WB relations described here, see Deacon (2015); Fergusson and Yeates (2021).

partnership of two UN IOs (ILO and UNDESA) plus a Bretton Woods institution (WB). It was managed from Geneva by the ILO, from its inception in 2004 onward. In practice, UNDESA's role was principally confned to monitoring and oversight.

The YEN network included development agencies, governments, the private sector, youth groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It had a major presence in 22 lead countries including a special focus on Africa, and programs in Asia, the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.13 The ILO's Lead Country Network collected data and prepared and implemented National Action Plans, focusing on employability, entrepreneurship, employment creation and equal opportunities. Direct fnancial support was confned to impact evaluations and small-scale entrepreneurship projects in Africa.

YEN prioritized awareness-raising, advocacy and capacity-building for youth organizations. It laid the groundwork for increased intergovernmental recognition that youth employment would be essential for meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Its most signifcant distinguishing feature was its attempt to redefne youth employment as a social development issue, rather than a labor issue. It also allowed the two leading IOs to operate and negotiate on an altered terrain that minimized the prominence of the contested elements of their non-aligned politicaleconomic positions, and to level-out their unequal strengths and powers. In practice, it was clear from the early years that YEN was shaped and defned in character with the ILO's longstanding priorities, and largely faithful to its predominant discourses. WB infuence on the framing and conduct of the local projects was palpably secondary: the ILO emerged as the appropriate leading player, given its employment-focused network and its ability to work on the ground in some of the most challenging economic and political YU environments. Its pre-eminent 'street-level' reach in such contexts made it best-placed to identify the geographies of priority, based on trustworthy data and local networking with governments and pre-existing embedded programs and organizations.

An independent evaluation in the closing years of the YEN partnership reported that:

<sup>13</sup> In the early stage of its establishment, YEN was fnanced by a desultory cluster of national government bodies (Denmark, Sweden, UK), the International Olympic Committee and ACCENTURE PLC as well as the ILO, WB and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

YEN is said to have shifted course in a way that fts well with [World] Bank priorities, and as a grantee of its Global Partnership for Youth Employment (GPYE) [see below] it is seen as a good catalyst. ILO has perhaps the closest but most complex relationship with YEN, whilst UNDESA works less closely with the YEN Secretariat than the other partners, and describes its contribution as 'minimal'. (International Labour Offce Evaluation Unit 2012, 4)

It is a signifcant and telling feature of this analysis of the work of leading IOs in this policy feld that the inter-institutional and intra-institutional politics between IOs are opaque to 'remote' researchers. The closest it is possible to get to this politics is to interpret the outputs of nominally independent bodies like the ILO's Evaluation Unit. Only original primary research could provide confdent insights into the closed relations within partnerships of this kind. Only tenuous deduction is therefore possible. Nonetheless, the Evaluations Unit's observation (triangulated with multiple other minor and contingent secondary indicators) strongly suggests an unequal division of labor in YEN, and some early 'sharing out' of control, as between a dominant and subordinate IO. The very conception of YEN was, self-evidently, not an untested ab initio venture, but an accretion of a wider and more ambitious structure that built on a longstanding pre-existing organizational framework—namely the ILO Lead Country Network, which was part of the ILO's employment-related work and other work in an extensive network (described above). It was this network that enabled YEN to begin new work in multiple localities barely three years after the MDGs were ratifed.

The inherent dominance of the ILO in all practical aspects of managing YEN cannot reasonably be imagined as anything less than a superior degree of power, compared to that of the WB within the partnership. It is therefore less than remarkable that, in 2008, the WB instigated its GPYE, nominally incorporating YEN as one partner alongside the Arab Urban Development Institute (a not-for-proft NGO), the International Youth Foundation (IYF) (an international charitable organization) and Understanding Children's Work (an inter-agency UN body).14 The partnership focused on providing applied research and learning to better

<sup>14</sup> See ILO 2012, International Labour Conference 101st session, Committee on Youth Employment (C.E.J./D. 186). https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/%2D%2Ded\_norm/%2D%2D-relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms\_182840.pdf. Accessed March 21, 2020.

understand school-to-work transitions and increase the employability of youth, promoting policy dialogue and supporting technical assistance for local governments and capacity-building for stakeholders from the public sector and civil society, to enhance their engagement—priorities that are entirely consistent with many of the WB's discourses as described above, and inconsistent with the ILO's founding discourses.

YEN's inclusion in GPYE maintained a de facto ILO presence in the partnership, for the duration of GPYE's short life. Much as the WB's early creation of GPYE gave the appearance of a successful 'take-over' bid when it 'incorporated' YEN, YEN's focus nevertheless changed under (largely direct) ILO leadership from Geneva, taking on more strategic activities through its Lead Country Network, including running YEN Networks, the youth-to-youth toolkit and monitoring and evaluation activities (ILO Evaluation Offce 2018). The YEN Secretariat ceased to function in 2014 when GPYE also ceased to operate (although YEN continues as a 'brand' in ILO projects).15

YEN and GPYE constituted the decade of endogenous partnership between the pre-eminent IOs in this policy feld. In all, YEN and GPYE had almost coterminous lifespans. The pressure for the ILO and WB to cooperate directly coincided with the 2001 Millennium Summit and ended in 2014. Initially, these previously often-counterposed IOs made common cause. Full cooperation in the YEN partnership nevertheless lasted little more than four years. As in all two-way partnerships (accepting that UNDESA/the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) were key actors only as sources of monitoring, oversight and funding), full and effective coordination depends on a single locus of governance and administration. This was initially acceded to ILO and its Geneva Offces. Primary research would be needed to provide empirical clarity about the early separation of these two dominant actors. But whatever the measures taken to ensure the WB's due infuence, they were selfevidently insuffcient to meet its preferences and priorities for addressing mass YU. The ILO's priorities at this time, shaped by its Global Employment Agenda, afforded strong emphasis to increasing aggregate demand for young people's labor, including by means of job creation and institutional labor market reforms, while also acknowledging some need

<sup>15</sup>By 2014, GPYE had been devolved to the IYF, which produced just two outputs. GPYE has since ceased to function. https://www.iyfnet.org/initiatives/global-partnership-youthemployment-gpye. Accessed February 25, 2020.

for ALMPs. The WB's corresponding priorities are best encapsulated in its Social Protection and Labor (SPL) strategy (itself committed to ALMPs) and building labor market resilience in young people (WB 2011). This approach epitomizes a supply-side emphasis in addressing the challenges of mass YU. These contrasting demand-side/supply-side emphases in YU policy also epitomize the tensions that came to underlie the strategic commitments of the ILO and WB through YEN and GPYE.

YEN and GPYE had been established under the shared UN umbrella of the MDGs: MDG1 included a commitment to full employment and decent work for young people. Complete severance of relations between these two leading would-be IO partners would therefore have been politically untenable. YEN continued to exist, nominally embedded within GPYE. This shifted the locus of power and funding from Geneva to Washington. However successfully the shift was mitigated by the ILO's continuing responsibility for YEN embedded within GPYE, the watershed from cooperation to coexistence *en route* to the separation of the ILO and WB had been crossed. Perhaps the most symbolic and informative aspects of this watershed lay in the ILO's continuing commitments to working in and through its Lead Country Networks using ILO on-the-ground infrastructure in lower-income countries, on one side of the dissolving partnership; and in the WB's enthusiasm for working with NGOs and Third Sector transnational organizations, on the other. Somewhat resonant of the distinctions between public/state versus Third Sector funding, this divergence set the stage for the next decade (and beyond) in this policy feld. It was a divergence that would be based wholly on exogenous partnership and, eventually, effective separation between the lead IO partners.

#### *Coexistence, Contestation, Division: Exogenous Partnership*

GPYE was replaced by an infnitely more ambitious and very different partnership wholly led by the WB: Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE). It is a multi-stakeholder partnership that was planned to begin in 2012, launched in 2014 and became operational in 2015. Its high ambition to see 150 million more young people in employment is said to depend on its ability to "catalyse the promotion of public, private, and civil sector innovations".16 To date, the largest of its dozen projects across

<sup>16</sup>World Bank (2015): http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/76591146819 4956530/Solutions-for-youth-employment-strategic-plan-2015-2020. Accessed February 25, 2020.

four continents has funding of just \$250 million and aims to secure employment for 500,000 young people. Described as a coalition, S4YE cultivates multiple and dynamically evolving interlocking partnerships building directly on the WB's affnity for Third Sector partnerships which it pioneered in GPYE, but moving far beyond it to embrace global corporates, and global fnanciers and banks. The nominal connection with the ILO continues in the form of the ILO's membership of S4YE's governing body—ostensibly largely confned to avoiding duplication and mutual conficts of interest in work in the YU feld. Alongside the IYF (itself carried over from GPYE), S4YE's original Third Sector partners include Plan International and Youth Business International (YBI), plus the RAND Corporation and Accenture. Original strategic partners include Hogan Lovells, Rockefeller Foundation, MasterCard and Ernst and Young.17

S4YE's 2015 inaugural Baseline Report commits to increasing the demand for young people's labor. From the outset, supply-side measures dominate three of the four 'Frontier Areas' of its strategic framework (S4YE 2015, 27).18 Only the 'Quality Jobs' frontier area is concerned with demand-side initiatives—generating jobs from private sector actors. No commitment is given to securing rights to social and labor protection.

In conception at least, S4YE anticipated the introduction of the UN's 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG8 prescribes the achievement of "full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities" by 2030.19 SDG Partnerships are expected to include multistakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and fnancial resources.

The ILO's involvement in S4YE appeared marginal from the outset, and this was eventually confrmed by its creation of the 'Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth' (GIDJY)—now the ILO's main contribution to addressing YU at program level. Launched in 2017, GIDJY also contributes to SDG8. It too is a multi-stakeholder partnership, albeit with more modest aims to train fve million young people across 26 projects focused on digital skills, apprenticeships, the rural economy, green jobs,

<sup>17</sup> S4YE has since included several more global corporates, transnational Third Sector agencies and government-funded International Development Agencies among its partners.

<sup>18</sup> https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/23261. Accessed February 25, 2020.

<sup>19</sup> https://indicators.report/targets/8-5/. Accessed February 25, 2020.

entrepreneurship and self-employment, transitions to the formal economy, and work in fragile settings and hazardous occupations (ILO, 2015a, 2015b). Perhaps its most notable feature is that its 'key partners' include 11 UN IOs/agencies and *exclude* the WB. More than any such partnership, GIDJY epitomizes the concept of a constellation of IOs, as much founded in other IOs and other transnational UN agencies as in Third Sector and corporate partnerships.20 It places great stress on decent work, the quality of jobs for young people, promoting human rights, fostering gender equality and strengthening public-private cooperation and coherence. These characteristics sharply mark off GIDJY from S4YE's priorities and methods.

S4YE and GIDJY (now branded as Decent Jobs for Youth (DJY)) are at relatively early stages of development, with limited outcomes to date that could be viewed as commensurate with their ambitions. For the purposes of this analysis at least, more important than their most immediate achievements are their signifcance as unprecedented innovative partnerships which envisage hugely ambitious scope for transforming employment for young people where it is not self-generating under optimum market conditions. But in the present context of understanding the architecture of the arguments and discourses these new partnerships deploy, alongside their implications for the nature of global social governance among leading IOs, their greatest signifcance is already palpable. Both these new exogenous partnerships were products of endogenous partnerships that had aspired to collaboration, cooperation and modes of successful engagement in this policy feld that would be greater than the achievements of the two leading IOs working separately. However, the frst attempt (YEN) lasted for less than four years under its original plans. A somewhat ambiguous, low-profle, half mutually embedded partnership between the ILO and WB (GPYE) endured for approximately six more years (although, as noted, vestiges of YEN remain). The absence of transparency in the functioning of these two IOs prevents empirically sound

20GIDJY's Key Partners are the ILO, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and UNIDO. Also included are multiple other UN agencies (FAO, ITU, UNHCR, UNDP, UNDESA, UNEP, UNFPA), international development agencies and charities (Citi Foundation, EYF, ITC, J-PAL, SCF, UNIAPAC, YBI), some global corporate entities (Microsoft, McDonald's, Nestle, Inter-American Development Bank), international not-for-proft organizations (AISEC, Forge), and some national government aid and ministerial bodies (Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, OIJ).

analyses of the outcomes of YEN and GPYE (notwithstanding the detailed ILO Evaluation Offce reports of 2012 and 2018): both IOs have been almost completely opaque as to the causes of their short-lived attempts at endogenous partnership.

Overlaying this already complex feld of policy actors, in 2018 the UN's Agenda 2030 program and its Youth Strategy introduced Generation Unlimited (GenU), to ensure that every young person is in education, learning, training or employment by 2030 (in pursuit of SDG8).21 As a major global multi-sector partnership, GenU's 53-member Board includes representatives from the ILO, OECD, the European Commission and a multiplicity of UN agencies, private-sector corporate bodies, national governments, Third Sector organizations and other IOs. The World Bank and UNICEF are GenU's key IO actors (already managing a \$1 billion allocation from WB). Interestingly, UNICEF (an historically marginal contributor in this feld) had displayed enthusiasm for supply-side measures, in common with the World Bank, at the start of the GFC.22 Their past shared positions (contrast ILO's and UNESCO's historical demand-side policy leanings) may well have infuenced the UN's decision-making when it constituted this UNICEF-WB alliance. Certainly, the prioritization of supply-side measures is clearly evident in GenU's early on-line outputs.23 The dominant political-economic character of GenU's work 'on the ground' has yet to be revealed. However, the exclusion of the ILO from GenU's Executive, and the preponderance of global private sector and Third Sector corporates on its Board are intrinsically note-worthy (again in contrast to ILO's preference for multiple UN agencies as its key partners in S4YE). Both these observations are consistent with the paths of 'separate development' taken by the World Bank and ILO when they initiated S4YE and DJY. This prompts the question as to why the UN elected to set up a third global partnership alongside them. GenU's commitment to work across public, private and civil society sectors and governments ostensibly replicates a key premise of S4YE's approach. GenU may complement S4YE and DJY—at greatly increased scale if it achieves its ambitions—or duplicate or supersede both partnerships.

<sup>21</sup> https://www.unicef.org/young-people. Accessed June 21, 2020.

<sup>22</sup> See Fergusson and Yeates (2014).

<sup>23</sup> https://www.generationunlimited.org/news-and-stories/world-leaders-unite-education-and-training-young-people. Accessed June 21, 2020.

#### Concluding Comments

As the key historical global actors in this feld, both the ILO and WB have maintained dominant positions, in part by giving attention to opposing policy priorities, by fnding some virtues in each other's dominant and normative discourses and policy logics, and sometimes by cooperating despite discursive differences. Each has endeavored to allow the other's position to stand alongside its own on some key policy dilemmas, without acceding to an opposing policy logic. Nevertheless, a highly condensed summary of their partnerships throws into stark relief the evolving trajectory of ILO-WB relations, as follows. Before the GFC, the ILO and WB coexisted and acted largely in mutual disregard, each identifable more by their differences than by their shared objectives. With the onset of the GFC in 2008, the ILO's YEN was already weakened as a major YU platform and risked being superseded by the WB's GPYE. By 2012–13, GPYE was palpably unequal to making a signifcant impact on the successive waves of burgeoning YU, as the effects of the GFC unfolded internationally. Yet the ILO was then still striving to accommodate the WB's supplyside-dominated priorities, and in 2014 still accepted the role of minor IO partner in the WB's ambitious, radically innovative cross-sector S4YE 'alliance'. Scarcely a year afterward, the ILO was distancing itself from S4YE while remaining on its Board, in order to initiate DJY, and was operating with unprecedented allocations of internal funding for implementation, without assistance from the WB, or by means of a WB presence on its Board.

Across nine years of the most intensive crisis of global YU in recorded history, the leading IOs moved full circle from largely mutually disregarding coexistence, through high-profle collaboration and formal partnership, to effective separation. At the point of separation, the ILO had exceptionally strong country networks and channels of local reach, and the WB retained access to extensive fnancial and other resources.

Understanding whether this cycle of rapid change is faithfully mirrored in both IOs' dominant policy analyses and modes of intervention in labor market and associated welfare policies requires detailed research that can only be achieved effectively by means of 'insider' access. Although much remains to be seen about the functionality and effectiveness of S4YE and DJY, the shift to exogenous partnerships embracing unprecedentedly wide and highly differentiated constellations of Third Sector/corporate partners constitutes a new mode of coexistence between the ILO and WB. This speaks to degrees of historical and recent contestation between them that have resulted in division into two new entities, one of which marks complete separation between the WB and ILO (DJY), the other of which retains only a nominal 'place at the table' for the ILO in a WB-defned universe (S4YE).

What also remains to be established by means of new empirical research is how far this extended history of partnership, division and separation can be attributed to the architecture of the arguments each IO deploys (along with their respective dissenting discourses); and how far it can be attributed to factors that have largely escaped the gaze of scholarship and research in this policy feld. Both IOs are committed to self-evaluation, in terms of program outcomes. But their evaluations cast no light on the politics of cooperation, collaboration, coexistence and contestation between them.

To infer sources of confict and separation from internally managed processes would be risky indeed, however strong the clues and correspondences between sources. It is clear that the balance of power and advantage between the WB and ILO has shifted signifcantly and more than once, in both directions, especially since the WB became fully active in the YU policy feld alongside the ILO. Sometimes these shifts have matched overarching paradigm shifts, like those of the 1980s–90s. How the dynamics of change occurred and were eventually resisted within and between them cannot be 'read off' from their work in any given policy feld. Equally risky would be to attempt to interpret the primary geo-political and political-economic purposes of the work of the ILO and WB from singlefeld-specifc contexts. The major attempts to stimulate engagement in the policy feld of YU in the wake of the GFC also invite skeptical speculation that the principal purposes of the work of the ILO and WB were at that time to allay international concern that burgeoning YU rates posed risks well beyond their impacts on national economies—risks of civil disorder, precipitate youth labor migration, and political tensions and conficts between semi-borderless nations. The need for the international community that funds (and seeks to infuence) the ILO and WB to be 'seen to act' was compelling. Both the MDGs and SDGs placed great emphasis on (and pressures toward) partnership for development. The SDG mandates in particular spurred the efforts of the ILO and WB to act in partnership. Through S4YE and DJY, the WB and ILO nominally meet these expectations while operating separately from one another. The recent advent of GenU, however, may be intended to re-calibrate partnerships and relations between key players, as UNICEF is thrust into the limelight. How such separated *and reconstituted* partnerships operate is largely opaque to the processes of independent evaluation, especially with regard to the evolving relationships between *three* lead IO actors.

Arm's-length scrutiny of complex partnerships involving multiple powerful players rarely manages to deliver insights into internal intra-IO micro-politics. Even studies that gain direct access can be 'called out' on their interpretations. For example, Deacon's ground-breaking work over the last two decades has been unique and pre-eminent in the study of the dynamics of IO relations in the global governance of social policy, especially of the ILO and WB. He found numerous examples of direct dissent and struggle between them in relation to employment, social protection and other policies (Deacon 2007, 2013, 2015). But despite his longstanding, intensive and often frst-hand studies, it would be rash to assume that Deacon's work has defnitively explained ILO-WB dynamics. His methodology has recently been respectfully and tentatively queried for drawing premature conclusions, and for being over-reliant on accounts that reference the personal dimensions of interaction (Cichon 2019). Other policy felds also query the more critical characterizations of the WB, and re-open questions about its political-economic predispositions and stances in the 1980s–90s (see e.g. Barrientos et al. 2011; Alderman and Yemtsov 2012; Abramo et al. 2019).

The debate on the contested subject of inter-IO relations remains far from resolution. Understanding of the effects of IOs' differences, tensions and conficts on policy outcomes also remains limited—just as knowledge of the workings of IOs' interior processes and interactions has remained commensurately limited regarding partnerships. The case for researchers to be afforded direct access to study the dynamics of key inter-IO relations is compelling. What is beyond doubt is that concerted attempts at the global governance of policies intended to alleviate continuous extremes of YU across many world regions have had ostensibly very limited impact to date. The spike in interest among most IOs in the face of the shocking scale of YU immediately after the onset of the GFC has long-since passed. Extreme youth unemployment in the Arab States, Northern Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, much of Europe and in Central and Western Asia are becoming normalized through their persistence. Among IOs, only the multi-stakeholder partnerships now operate 'on location' across these regions.

Whether the de facto separation of the work of the ILO and WB proves more productive than their past partnerships remains to be seen. The insertion of UNICEF into the feld compounds the uncertainty. As other one-time IO actors in this feld fell away 'after the crisis', perhaps the question of greatest importance is whether the re-distributional powers inherent in the global social governance of youth (un)employment policy can reasonably be deemed adequate—especially in a world in which the numbers of 15–24-year-olds who are not in employment or studying or training is still estimated to substantially exceed 100 million. One certainty, though, is that the work of all three leading IOs will be severely tested by the immanent transnational effects of the SARS-Cov-2 (Covid-19) pandemic of 2020 and beyond with regard to collapsing labor markets in which young people are reliably the frst victims.24

#### References

<sup>24</sup>For a fuller exposition see Fergusson and Yeates (2021).

World Bank. 2011. Social protection and labor strategy 2012–2022: resilience, equity and opportunity. Washington DC: World Bank.

Yeates, Nicola. 2000. *Globalisation and Social Policy*. London: Sage.

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# International Organizations and Global Labor Standards

*Friederike Römer, Jakob Henninger, and Thuy Dung Le*

# Introduction

Working conditions and labor standards vary drastically across countries and sectors. Especially—but not only—in the Global South, workers often face hazardous conditions at their workplace resulting in occupational accidents

This chapter is a product of the research conducted at the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
T. D. Le

F. Römer (\*) • J. Henninger

Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 57

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_3

and work-related diseases. Examples of perilous circumstances and deathly events are tragically abundant. Based on data collected by the International Labour Organization (ILO), Hämäläinen, Takala and Boon Kiat (2017, 4) estimate that there are 2.78 million deaths due to work-related causes each year.1 This fgure shows that the issue goes beyond widely publicized incidents such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in 2013 which caused the death of at least 1134 workers. Improving working conditions for people across the world is therefore an urgent and topical matter. But it is not limited to standards on occupational safety: In fact, achieving consensus on what should constitute a set of global (minimum) labor standards is crucial to prevent a potential 'race to the bottom' that places competitiveness and maximum profts over safe and humane working conditions.

In this chapter, we set out to investigate how international and regional organizations have positioned themselves toward global labor standards. Two questions guide our analyses. First, we want to outline why there is no agreement among International Organizations (IOs) on what constitutes a set of desirable global labor standards. We argue that disagreement both between and within IOs persists for two reasons, namely conficting ideological beliefs on the desirability of labor standards, but also because of strong regional differences. In effect, this has contributed to a decentralized system of global governance which employs a variety of differentially effective enforcement mechanisms (see Hurd 2003). Second, we will take a look at how labor standards are governed at the level of regional organizations, investigating whether regional organizations might in fact be better equipped to come to agreements given that they represent more homogeneous groups of countries than IOs.

The chapter starts by briefy exploring various conceptualizations of labor standards and by outlining the two contesting discourses, namely the 'social' and the 'neoliberal' discourses, and how labor standards, notably Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining (FACB) rights, are perceived in each of these modes of thought. It proceeds to present the positions of three key international actors, the ILO, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank (WB). This selection does not constitute an exhaustive mapping of the feld, where other organizations, notably the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are also infuential actors.

<sup>1</sup>Their estimates are based on data for the years 2014 and 2015 (Hämäläinen et al. 2017, 5).