The Gates Foundation and the privatization of international organizations

The World Health Organization’s annual meeting opened yesterday amidst unprecedented world attention. The session was virtual but the political drama real, including on Taiwan’s bid for participation, U.S. complaints about WHO malfeasance, Chinese President Xi’s conciliatory speech, and swirling debate about how to address the virus’s origins.

In the not-very-distant background are money matters and, in particular, the Trump administration’s threats (renewed yesterday, via Twitter) to slash U.S. contributions. Much of the commentary on WHO funding has naturally focused on the relative financial pull of Washington and Beijing, how the organization can navigate between the two feuding behemoths, and the programmatic impacts of possible U.S. cuts.

There’s been less attention to another aspect of the WHO’s bookkeeping: the remarkable prominence of nongovernmental funders, and the Gates Foundation in particular. I will confess to knowing very little about the WHO’s operations before the pandemic, and the fact that a private foundation is the organization’s second largest source (edging out the United Kingdom) came as a revelation.

Those of us who specialize in international organizations are familiar with the dynamic of states as the paymasters. And scholars have done good work tracking the political and conceptual influence of nongovernmental organizations in some contexts. But I don’t think we’ve grappled enough with the implications of private funding for international organizations. The Gates Foundation contributions are extraordinary, but private money flows into international organizations in plenty of other ways. UN human rights rapporteurs, for example, often get support and research funding from private charities and corporations. And multinational corporations have partnered with intergovernmental organizations in myriad other ways.

One of the few sustained examinations I’ve seen of the phenomenon came through a special issue of Global Policy in 2017. And two authors in that issue, Karolin Seitz and Jens Martin, offered a cautionary analysis of the implications:

The changes in funding practices have deep implications for global governance. Private funding runs the risk of turning UN agencies, funds and programmes into contractors for bilateral or public‐private projects, eroding the multilateral character of the system and undermining democratic global governance. Multilateral mandates become increasingly difficult to carry out, as a profusion of earmarked projects undermines coherence, planning and coordinated action.

As corporate money and vast individual fortunes slosh around, there’s no reason to expect that international organizations won’t catch the eye of other private actors trying to make a global impact. For the moment, the Washington-Beijing strum und drang must be the center of attention. But in terms of global governance dynamics, the role of private funders may be as important.