International Organizations and the Global Social Governance of Pensions

The chapter on international organizations (IOs) and the global social governance of pensions analyzes the way in which IOs have competed to shape the pensions discourse. It shows how the organizational field has been shaped by the dominant economic paradigm, which has created space for IOs to operate in the policy area. A paradigmatic change creates the environmental conditions for new IOs to enter the field and compete or cooperate with the existing IOs to shape the discourse. The intrinsic features of each IO operating in the pension reform arena will be shown to determine their approach to influencing the pensions discourse and how they respond to rivals entering the field.

IOs and Climate Change: Toward Global Eco-Social Policy

In the twenty-first century, climate change poses a major challenge to the work of IOs. This chapter contextualizes the historical shift from more compartmentalized understandings of climate change at the IO level, toward the current understanding of climate change as a pervasive threat to social policy across various issue areas. Fueled by ongoing discourse surrounding the Sustainable Development Agenda at the United Nations, a multiplicity of IOs are framing social policy issues in relation to climate change that may have traditionally been viewed as largely separate. The cross-cutting nature of the issue for IOs is highlighted, and as illustrated via an exploration of climate insurance as a social policy tool, climate change has led to compelling developments regarding the archetypal roles of IOs as actors of soft governance, raising questions for the future of IOs in the context of climate change and social policy engagement.

International Organizations and Food: Nearing the End of the Lean Season?

This chapter maps the field of international organizations (IOs) in food that has been institutionalized as a global policy field since WWII and has undergone several shifts since then. The chapter traces the emergence of the major IOs of the field, especially the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Program, and more recently also the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund. The second half of the twentieth century began with visionary ideas about the global regulation of food production and consumption, moved to a concern with smallholders and food security, and ended with a neoliberal shift away from production toward ensuring consumption through world trade. The new millennium is marked by a rhetorical consensus between the main IOs, new debates about production, hopes in the social protection agenda, as well as increasingly vocal organized critics of the dominant order.

Global Discourses, Regional Framings and Individual Showcasing: Analyzing the World of Education IOs

Education is commonly heralded as one of the key policies for fostering future progress and well-being. Hence, education policy can be conceptualized as a social policy as it enables individuals to acquire skills for living an independent and fulfilled life while also providing states with a toolkit to stimulate economic growth and social cohesion. In this chapter, we first map the population of education International Organizations (IOs) to describe the organizational field in which the social policy discourse in the sub-area of education takes place. The assessment of what types of IOs deal with education is summarized in a typology to identify different clusters of IOs and provide accounts of both their characteristics and the different niches they have populated in the organizational field of education policy. Second, the ideas IOs hold regarding education are analyzed and it is shown how the discourse on education has developed over time within the population of IOs.

International Organizations, Care and Migration: The Case of Migrant Health Care Workers

Nicola Yeates and Jane Pillinger offer a much-needed summary of the historical development of health care worker migration as a global social policy field in which distinct fields of care and migration overlap. Focusing on international governmental and non-governmental organizations, the chapter draws attention to shifting constellations of ideas, actors and institutions in this field since the end of WWII to the present day. It emphasizes the necessity of a pluralistic and dynamic understanding of the field, and the role of contestation, cooperation and coordination in the unfolding of global policy, in order to better comprehend the origins of this field and its key characteristics. Emphasizing a multi-sectoral perspective and lateral connections in the construction of this global social policy field, Yeates and Pillinger explore the methodological and analytical implications of this for the study of IOs in global social policy more generally.

IOs’ Role in Global Social Governance: Family Policy

This chapter focuses on family policy as an object of global social governance. From the 1990s to 2008, the family policy field was bifurcated. One part, focused on family norms in the North, followed the shift from the male breadwinner to the adult earner family with its work-family tensions. Here the main IOs were the ILO and the OECD. The second part focused on the South and policies targeting children in poor families. Although UNICEF clearly played an important role on the ground here, it was the World Bank that took the lead in elaborating and disseminating the core ideas. Since the 2008 crisis, the field has come together through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which simultaneously address both North and South. The dominant discourse is ‘inclusive growth’, challenged by the more critical discourse on the ‘care economy’.

Disability as a ‘New’ Global Social Theme: The Role of International Organizations in an Expanding Global Policy Field

Disability as a global social policy issue has gained increasing importance during recent decades, partly due to a shift in conceptualization from a medical to a social perspective on disability. This new relevance has led to the emergence of a global organizational field around the topic, with a high involvement of International Organizations (IOs). In order to investigate the population of IOs in the field, this chapter identifies influential actors, relates them to the main discourses, and maps their relations. It can be seen that agencies of the United Nations have become the key actors in promoting the rights-based social perspective and the monitoring of the implementation of disability rights. In contrast, the World Health Organization is still the leading organization in the provision of medical classification systems. Overall, it can be noted that the organizational field leaves space for IOs to influence the direction of global and national disability policy.

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

As this chapter is the introduction to the book, it lays out in broad strokes the knowledge about the purposes, functions and characteristics of International Organizations (IOs) in general, and their involvement in social policy issues in particular. It then sets out some basic conceptualizations for studying IOs in global social governance before specifying the framework applied for exploring populations and discourses of IOs in global social policies. Complementing liberal and constructivist IR theories, the volume uses organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for the analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance. ‘Populations’ are identified as the dominant as well as regional IOs active in a specific social policy issue; 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 influence behavior.

International Organizations and Global Labor Standards

This chapter compares how three International and two regional Organizations, namely the ILO, the WTO, and the World Bank, as well as ASEAN and Mercosur, approach the global governance of labor standards. Defining ‘labor standards’ is notoriously difficult. We therefore use Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining (FACB) rights as a benchmark to assess the positions taken by the five regional organizations. We argue that two main discourses have been pursued in the global debate, a ‘social’ discourse, and a ‘neoliberal’ discourse. We find that organizations whose intrinsic features allow for an institutionalized representation of workers’ interests pursue variations of the social discourse, whereas a neoliberal position predominates in organizations where this representation is lacking. This is true both at the international and regional level. Moreover, we show that the coexistence of these two conflicting discourses has led to contestation, but also to exchange and cooperation. We furthermore outline to what extent the two discourses have changed over time. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of future challenges for the global governance of labor standards.

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

To date, global social policy has afforded minimal attention to the ways International Organizations (IOs) have responded to youth unemployment as an important and distinctive policy field. This chapter redresses this gap in the literature by means of a critical analysis of the governance capacities of the key IOs (particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank (WB)), toward developing a wider understanding of modes of global social governance. The chapter establishes the historical context of multiple IOs’ engagements in this policy field. It focuses on the evolving relationships between the ILO and the WB and their construction of, and withdrawal from, partnerships that variously facilitated and limited the pursuit of their respective strategies and goals for alleviating youth unemployment. Focusing on the ILO’s and the WB’s policy discourses, the chapter traces the trajectories of joint partnerships that were dissolved, and of externally facing partnerships that better reflect distinctive ILO and WB priorities.