The authority of meta-organisations: Making the international association of National Public Health Institutes attractive to prospective members

ABSTRACT

International organisations are key actors in global governance. Among them is a growing group of international meta-organisations (IMOs) – organisations whose members are themselves organisations. Understanding how IMOs become worth joining demands an explanation of how they try to gain value in the eyes of prospective members. The article analyses the case of the International Association of National Public Health Institutes, which rapidly amassed a membership in excess of 100 organisations from more than 90 countries. The analysis identifies different aspects of epistemic work through which an IMO may accumulate and assert its authority while it aims to become an attractive body to belong to for potential members. Drawing on the theoretical framework of epistemic governance, the article suggests that IMOs are accumulations of authority that can be utilised in national policy-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Authority
• epistemic governance
• global governance
• meta-organisations
• neo-institutionalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Valtteri Vähä-Savo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5641-0952

Jukka Syväterä http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5387-667X

Notes

1 Before the IANPHI, there were already several international governmental organisations (e.g. World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), and international non-governmental organisations (e.g. the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the International Union for Health Promotion and Education, the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, the International Society for Infectious Diseases, the International Union Against TB and Lung Diseases, the Malaria Consortium, the Target TB and the TB Alert) tackling public health issues and infectious diseases.

2 The Poison Control Centre of Morocco has also been considered as one of the institutes to be merged in some plans (IANPHI, 2011c).

3 The IANPHI Executive Board approved a $200,000 grant to the Moroccan Ministry of Health to make this ‘transformative effort’ happen in 2011 (IANPHI, 2011c).

4 Although the document is officially an IANPHI report, it was written by two former directors general of the National Public Health Institute of Finland, one of whom was also the director general of the merged entity when the report was published.

5 By ‘certification’ we refer to public political endorsement by another prestigious institution, not to any official procedure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grants 276076 and 292353 and by the Kone Foundation.