The World Health Organization: the role of bureaucratic entrepreneurs between regime integration and separation”

Transcending physical and political boundaries, pandemics pose particularly challenging management problems. Referred to as the "classical regime", the normative architecture to combat pathogenic threats has shown a significant degree of "resilience" with regards to its core features, consistently with the prevailing literature about institutional "robustness." Nonetheless, since (and notwithstanding) the New International Health Regulations' adoption in 2005, the regime has been increasingly criticized for the poor management of most global health crises. Under this perspective, this paper aims at adding to the current debate about regimes' survival and decline with a case-study based investigation of global health governance's resilience strategies. In order to do that, this study will draw on extant literature in IR and International Institutional Law to produce an original taxonomy of a regime's "resilience" (denial/resistance vs. adaptation vs. enhancement vs. delegation) and to specify the overall mechanisms through which regimes can "resile" (concentration vs. contestation). The second part will turn to empirical analysis and will consider the type of "resilience" that the regime has executed before and after 2005 (with a specific focus on the health crisis of the last twenty years and Covid-19 as a case in point), eventually making explicit hypotheses about the regime's survival perspectives.