Managing the crisis: international organisations’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as legitimation work

Abstract

This paper analyzes legitimation practices of international organisations in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse a sample of 252 major international governmental organisations (IGOs) and 250 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), using information collected from their websites in September – December 2020. We seek to understand why the vast majority of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the crisis and what were the different types of reactions. We study variations in legitimation practices among different types of organisations – governmental vs non-governmental, general-purpose vs task-specific, large vs small, etc. Drawing on rational choice and neo-institutionalist scholarship, we test several hypotheses to account for the patterns of IO’s legitimation work triggered by COVID-19 crisis. Our findings give some support to both theoretical perspectives. Organisation’s resources are the best predictor for its conduct in response to the crisis. At the same time, organisations largely behave in a conformist way, actively engaging in legitimation work, and investing in their public visibility in relation to COVID-19 pandemic.