Health security, who leads the way? The role of expert knowledge and entrepreneurs in IOs mission creep and global norm-setting

Since the year 2000, the Global Health Security discourse has achieved unprecedented popularity, fed policy decisions, and informed a burgeoning literature investigating the connections existing between previously separated fields of international relations. More importantly, a network of nested and overlapping rules and practices has been negotiated (and contested) at the interface between health and security therefore changing the legal dimension and practical management of those international crisis where chemical and biological agents are intentionally or accidentally released (from the Amerithrax to Ebola, to the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic). As the leading agency for Global Public Health, the World Health Organization (WHO) has played a key (although often hidden) role in driving the process. Building on an in-depth review of WHO’s strategic documents and a series of interviews with key staff from within the Organization, this work roads test the intuition that the IO’s mission creep is one of the decisive factors behind the “health-security” interface norm-setting. In particular, it concludes that when the problem at stake requires specialized and technical know-how, both epistemic communities and working-level relationships among scientists and experts can steer bureaucratic action and empower the Organization itself to authorize and legitimize the creation of linkages (or mechanisms of distancing) between different bodies of norms thus guiding the depth and pace of legal changes.