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European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20
Managing the crisis: International organisations’
responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as
legitimation work
Olga Ulybina, Laia Pi Ferrer & Pertti Alasuutari
To cite this article: Olga Ulybina, Laia Pi Ferrer & Pertti Alasuutari (2023): Managing the
crisis: International organisations’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as legitimation work,
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2023.2195479
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2023.2195479
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Published online: 30 Mar 2023.
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Managing the crisis: International organisations’
responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as legitimation
work
Olga Ulybina
a
, Laia Pi Ferrer
a,b
and Pertti Alasuutari
a
a
Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland;
b
Institute for Advanced
Family Studies, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), Barcelona, Spain
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes legitimation practices of international organisations in the
face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse a sample of 252 major
international governmental organisations (IGOs) and 250 international non-
governmental organisations (INGOs), using information collected from their
websites in September –December 2020. We seek to understand why the
vast majority of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the crisis and what were
the different types of reactions. We study variations in legitimation practices
among different types of organisations –governmental vs non-governmental,
general-purpose vs task-specific, large vs small, etc. Drawing on rational
choice and neo-institutionalist scholarship, we test several hypotheses to
account for the patterns of IO’s legitimation work triggered by COVID-19
crisis. Our findings give some support to both theoretical perspectives.
Organisation’s resources are the best predictor for its conduct in response to
the crisis. At the same time, organisations largely behave in a conformist way,
actively engaging in legitimation work, and investing in their public visibility
in relation to COVID-19 pandemic.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 December 2021; Accepted 22 March 2023
KEYWORDS International organisations; COVID-19; legitimacy; legitimation; rational choice; neo-
institutionalism
Introduction
Since 2020, the world has been grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic.
National governments throughout the world have introduced all kinds of
policy measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic and to ease its
socio-economic consequences. Even though the COVID-19 outbreak
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the
posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
CONTACT Olga Ulybina olga.ulybina@tuni.fi
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2023.2195479
poses an ongoing challenge to the proper actions taken and the optimal
timing to implement them (see Ferguson et al., 2020), unprecedented
policy measures restricting individual behaviour and movements have
been adopted across the world in a surprisingly homogenous manner
despite presenting important differences in the number of cases
(Capano et al., 2020; Sebhatu et al., 2020). However, national govern-
ments are not the only actors taking actions concerning the COVID-19
pandemic. Scientists in various disciplines have also quickly launched
research projects studying the pandemic. Organisations specialised in
health and pandemics such as the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDP)
are also mitigating the pandemic by producing knowledge and rec-
ommendations that can be of use to decision-makers and the population
at large. Furthermore, a large majority of international organisations
(IOs), both intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and international
non-governmental organisations (INGOs), have responded to the pan-
demic one way or another, even if their regular activities and goals are
unrelated to global health policy coordination and fighting the pandemic
(Debre & Dijkstra, 2021; Ulybina et al., 2022).
Considering the overwhelming response to the COVID-19 pandemic
also by IOs whose activities are unrelated to it, we suggest it is fair to say
that at least some of those responses can be interpreted as attempts to be
perceived as useful or visible in a situation where the whole world’s atten-
tion is centred on a single thing. Since an IO’s existence is in the last
instance dependent on its members’and sponsors’conviction that the
organisation serves its purpose and has authority –that is, influence on
others’behaviour (on authority, see Alasuutari, 2018;Stroup&Wong,
2017;Zürnetal.,2012), all its activities can be considered as part of its legit-
imation strategies. For example, an IO may respond to the crisis by launch-
ing a special programme that seeks to mitigate the consequences of the
pandemic. On the other hand, such behavioural legitimation (Deephouse
et al., 2017; Halliday et al., 2010) by doing its best to serve its members
in a changed situation, may not necessarily be sufficient, because legitimacy
and authority are relational, dependent on perceptions. Organisations also
need to pay attention to their visibility, public image, or branding (on
branding, see e.g. Vestergaard, 2008). Hence, responses may also be
purely cosmetic or symbolic (Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990).
By analysing a representative sample of the most prestigious IGOs and
INGOs, in this article we seek to account for IOs’legitimation practices
in the face of the global COVID-19 crisis. We study why a vast majority
2O. ULYBINA ET AL.
of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the crisis and what were the
different types of reactions. To make the rationales behind IOs’responses
to the crisis understandable, we also study how different types of IOs’
differ from one another. Theoretically, we assess this issue from a rational
choice perspective and neoinstitutionalist perspective. From a rational
choice perspective, one could assume that, more dependent on their
donors’support and public image, general-purpose organisations and
INGOs are more likely to engage in all manner of legitimation practices,
whereas special-purpose organisations’legitimation work depends on how
closely their task relates to the pandemic. From a neoinstitutionalist per-
spective, on the other hand, the more resources an IO has, the more
likely it will engage in both behavioural and symbolic legitimation practices.
The findings of this article are based on the information collected from
the websites of analysed organisations in September–December 2020. In
the next sections, we review relevant literature on factors that affect IOs’
legitimation practices. Then, after describing our data and methods, we
present and discuss the results.
Rational choices and conformism in IOs’legitimation work
Legitimacy, i.e. being perceived as a rightful actor carrying out appropri-
ate activities (Dingwerth et al., 2019, p. 31; Zürn & Stephen, 2010), is
important for all IOs, both IGOs and INGOs, which compete for atten-
tion, funding and power (Hurd, 2019; Ossewaarde et al., 2008; Schmitz,
2020; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019). It has even been argued that legitimacy
is the only resource that IOs have for maintaining their authority (Ding-
werth et al., 2019, p. 33).
Given that legitimation is based on an appeal to the common interest
of the collective (Zürn & Stephen, 2010), major crises such as the
COVID-19 pandemic can create an urgent need, as well as a fruitful
ground, for pursuing legitimation strategies. In other words, it seems
reasonable to expect that a large portion of organisations will engage in
legitimation work and self-promotion in response to COVID-19 pan-
demic one way or another.
Scholarship in this area, however, suggests that the legitimation needs of
IGOs and INGOs are somewhat different. Zürn and Stephen (2010) note
that IGOs have been experiencing a growing demand for legitimation.
To compete successfully, they try to boost their own legitimacy in the
eyes of funding providers, the public, and other stakeholders (Bexell
et al., 2020). In other words, they are engaged in legitimation work
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 3
(Tallberg & Zürn, 2019). Some IGOs are acknowledged in international
law, and states have committed themselves to their norms in some ways,
but for the most part legitimacy is a question of respect and reputation,
closely tied to third-party perceptions that the organisation acts according
to current norms –not only legal, but also moral, social, cultural, etc. On
the other hand, for INGOs, reputation is even more important. Because
they get a significant proportion of their funding from individual private
donors and civil society organisations, they need to care about their
public legitimacy and reputation to maintain sponsors’confidence, and
thus, ensure their survival (Verbruggen et al., 2011; Wiepking & Maas,
2009). According to Suchman (1995), organisational legitimacy literature
can be divided into two traditions: strategic approaches to legitimacy and
institutional approaches. While the strategic approaches conceive legiti-
macy as a managerial perspective based on the organisation’s instrumental
deployment of evocative symbols in order to have social support, the insti-
tutional approaches understand legitimacy as a result of cultural pressure
that goes beyond the organisation’s intentional control. Although legiti-
macy can be seen through the lens of a rational and/or institutional frame-
work, the debate on how certain changes and actions can be attributed to
one of these two has been a question of lively debate and research (see e.g.
Kraatz & Zajac, 1996). On that basis, from a rational choice perspective, we
expect INGOs to be more likely to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a legit-
imation opportunity than IGOs.
Then again, IOs represent a highly heterogenous set of organisations,
with varying needs in public legitimation. In this respect, following the
categorisation applied to IGOs, we suggest that there are two types of
organisations, task-specific and general-purpose IOs (Lenz et al., 2014),
which face diverging needs. Task-specific IOs do not focus on the inter-
ests of their members but rather on shared problems in a particular policy
domain. This is the case, for example, with the International Whaling
Commission, International Organization for Migration, International
Maritime Organization (IGOs); World Organization against Torture,
and Human Rights Watch (INGOs). These kind of organisations have
a relatively narrow target audience and may not feel the need to interact
with the public and to boost their public legitimacy to the same extent
(Lenz et al., 2014). General-purpose IOs, on the other hand, have a
broad policy scope and they focus on the provision of public goods for
a particular transnational community. IGOs such as the EU, the
African Union, the Benelux Community, the Caribbean Community,
and the Commonwealth of Independent States (IGOs), BRAC, Acted,
4O. ULYBINA ET AL.
and Mercy Corps (INGOs) belong to this category. Their portfolio may
include dealing with trade or security problems, alongside environmental
issues, healthcare, human rights, etc. (Lenz et al., 2014, p. 132). In other
words, general-purpose IOs tend to be umbrella organisations, with a
broad spectrum of policy issues on the agenda. Hence it can be
assumed that, on average, they are more concerned with their reputation
and legitimacy in the eyes of the general public.
On that basis, we hypothesize that general-purpose organisations are
more than task-specific organisations engaged in publicising their role
in the pandemic-induced crisis. Related to that we assume that among
task-specific IOs, those whose tasks are directly related to the pandemic
are more likely to take an active role in the crisis than others.
Researchers have proposed different ways to classify sources of IOs’
legitimacy and hence, different types of legitimation practices. Thus,
Scholte (2019) distinguishes between three major bases of legitimacy:
institutional (relating to ‘procedure, performance, purpose, and person-
ality’), individual (relating to identity, interest, emotion, social trust,
and political knowledge), and societal (relating to prevailing norms, mod-
ernity, capitalism, discourse, a hegemonic state, and social stratification).
In relation to INGOs specifically, Ossewaarde et al. (2008) identify four
dimensions of legitimacy: normative (showing compliance with prevalent
societal norms and ideals), regulatory (showing compliance with inter-
national law), cognitive (ability to show that they are cognitively
capable of acting on behalf of the stated mission), and output legitimacy
(ability to show the effectuation of their missions to their stakeholders).
Furthermore, Ashforth and Gibbs (1990, p. 178) make a distinction
between symbolic and substantive legitimation. Symbolic legitimation
depicts actions aimed at transforming the meaning of acts to make
them look consistent with current values and ideas or expectations,
whereas substantive legitimation means ‘real, material changes in organ-
isational goals, structures, and processes or social institutionalised prac-
tices’(1990, p. 180). Other scholars have proposed a similar distinction
between discursive (or rhetorical, or verbal) and behavioural legitimation
(Deephouse et al., 2017; Halliday et al., 2010; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019).
The scholars mentioned above note that a distinction separating sym-
bolic from substantive or discursive from behavioural legitimation prac-
tices is empirically challenging because they tend to go together. When
studying a large sample of IOs, it is also practically impossible for
researchers to make first-hand observations about what each IO does
in real life. One must rely on the organisation’s own description, which
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 5
can also be considered as symbolic or discursive legitimation. In any case,
in this study we treat information found on IOs’websites about them
mitigating the pandemic, alleviating its harmful effects, producing knowl-
edge about COVID-19, or publishing instructions about how to manage
the situation as behavioural legitimation, whereas purely verbal refer-
ences to the pandemic are treated as symbolic legitimation.
As to different types of symbolic legitimation, from a rational choice
perspective it can be inferred that general-purpose and special-purpose
organisations are likely to pursue different legitimation strategies. Fol-
lowing Tallberg and Zürn (2019), we hypothesize that task-specific
organisations are more likely to legitimize their activities regarding the
pandemic with reference to their purpose, whereas general-purpose
organisations are more likely to legitimize themselves with reference to
universally shared principles such as democracy, participation, transpar-
ency, and rights protection.
The scholarship within sociological institutionalism opens another
perspective on legitimacy and legitimation. Rather than focusing on
different types of actors’diverging interests that result in differing legit-
imation strategies, neo-institutionalist world society theory (WST)
emphasizes that actors are conformist: they tend to behave similarly to
others. Since IOs’legitimacy and authority are relational, ‘conferred by
others’(Dingwerth et al., 2019, p. 32) or ‘socially embedded’(Tallberg
& Zürn, 2019), organisations seek to justify their existence and activities
in terms of predominant beliefs, values, and norms. This conformism has
led to growing isomorphism amongst all manner of organisations.
According to Meyer and Bromley (2013), recent decades have witnessed
a rapid growth of formal organisation in all social sectors the world over.
For example, an increasing number of non-profits want to call themselves
NGOs rather than, say, charities or churches. This also means that all
types of IOs look similar and want to be seen as powerful global actors.
Although they have little sanctioning power over government policies,
IGOs and INGOs ‘act as if they were authorised in the strongest possible
terms’(Boli & Thomas, 1999, p. 37), creating the image of themselves as
official representatives of stakeholder groups who play a key role in gov-
ernance. Therefore, as general respect for an actor is based on a shared
belief in the actor’s importance, authority can be considered as epistemic
capital that actors accumulate from various kinds: capacity-based, onto-
logical, moral, and charismatic authority (Alasuutari, 2018).
Research in the WST tradition maintains, though, that growing iso-
morphism is restricted to stated principles and formal organisational
6O. ULYBINA ET AL.
structures, whereas actual practices may significantly deviate from the
rhetoric used to proffer IOs’legitimacy. There are conflicts between nor-
mative demands on the one hand and material or technical restrictions
on the other (Von Billerbeck, 2020). This can often result in ‘organized
hypocrisy’(Brunsson, 1989), meaning that to manage these inconsisten-
cies, organisations comply with normative demands symbolically while
simultaneously undertaking actions that contradict those norms, a
process Meyer and Rowan (1977) call decoupling. When behavioural
legitimation work is difficult, for example because of scarce resources,
conformity is performed symbolically, leading to hypocrisy and to decou-
pling between stated principles and actual practices, or between actions
and their actual significance (Alasuutari, 2015; Brandtner, 2021;
Bromley & Powell, 2012).
From this perspective, it can be predicted that IOs seek to enhance
their legitimacy and authority in every way possible for them, regardless
of the type of the IO or what it is initially tasked to do. Whereas from a
rational choice perspective it could be hypothesized that task-specific
organisations with little to do with the pandemic do not waste their
resources on the issue, from the neoinstitutionalist viewpoint we expect
to see that the more resources an IO has, the more likely it responds to
the COVID-19 pandemic in various ways.
Data and methods
We analysed a sample of 252 IGOs and 250 INGOs. The list of IGOs was
retrieved from the online version of the Yearbook of International
Organizations, accessed in October-November 2020. It includes two
types of IGOs: universal membership organisations or intercontinental
membership organisations (76 IGOs in total); and ‘regionally defined
membership organisations’(214 IGOs in total). The list of INGOsis
based on the Top 500 NGOs list (2020 edition) provided by the media
organisation NGO Advisor (https://www.ngoadvisor.net/). For our analy-
sis, we selected the first top 250 INGOs from the 2020 ranking list. Using
the above ranking means that the INGOs we analyse are widely regarded
as influential, looked up to as sources of international best practice.
For each organisation, data were gathered about the organisation itself
and how it related itself and responded to the COVID-19 crisis. To do so,
we collected and coded the data on organisational size; responses to pre-
vious pandemics (since these responses characterised organisations prior
to COVID-19 pandemic); and the policy scope of the organisation. The
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 7
data for the latter characteristic were collected and coded somewhat
differently for IGOs and INGOs: IGOs were coded on the basis of their
aims as task-specific or general-purpose organisations; INGOs were
coded according to the number of sectors they work in. Some additional
characteristics were coded only for IGOs or for INGOs (for more detail
see Table A1 in Appendix A).
We collected data on how organisations publicly engaged with and
responded to COVID-19 crisis and approached these reactions from the
viewpoint of legitimation work. We treat websites as an incorporation
of public legitimation strategy. To capture different types of engagement
with and responses to the COVID-19 crisis, we collected, conducted
content analysis, and coded the following data for each organisation: (a)
verbal reactions to COVID-19 crisis: statements justifying the importance
of the organisation to mitigating the crisis; statements reminding of the
organisation’s mission in the context of COVID-19 crisis but not necess-
arily relevant to mitigating the crisis; statements about organisational
compliance with some national or international COVID-19 related regu-
lations; (b) provision of material support to third parties; (c) running edu-
cational and awareness raising projects; (d) issuing guidelines to third
parties; (e) producing knowledge; and (f) sharing third party information
(for more details see Table A2 in Appendix A). We used inductive coding,
i.e. the coding scheme was derived from the data, defined and modified
during the preliminary analysis. Data for each type of response were
coded in a binary way: yes (1) or no (0), and the coding was done by
two authors. Given that this study is a website-based assessment, we
discuss the publicly visible responses of organisations to the COVID-19
crisis. Given the variation in the structure and design of webpages, we
only analyse the content of webpages and ignore the potentially varying
visibility of relevant messages, such as their position within the website,
font and colour. Similarly, even though the institutional environment of
the organisations may play an important role in explaining their responses
and behaviour, systematizing and comparing the environments of all the
organisations in detail is challenging. Hence, we do not code the environ-
ment of the organisations. Possible internal organisational changes that
have not been publicised are not discussed in this paper.
Differences between IOs in responding to the crisis
An overview of the data, 252 IGOs and 250 INGOs, shows that the pan-
demic indeed aroused a lot of interest among the organisations. A large
8O. ULYBINA ET AL.
majority of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the pandemic one way
or another. And as we expected, INGOs’response rate (88%) was signifi-
cantly higher than that of IGOs (60%, see Table 1). This is in line with the
first hypothesis according to which INGOs have a bigger need for legit-
imation and hence to respond to the crisis one way or another.
As to the different types of organisations, we hypothesized that
general-purpose organisations are more than task-specific organisations
engaged in publicising their role in the pandemic-induced crisis. To
test this hypothesis, we applied this typology originally created to cat-
egorise IGOs (Lenz et al., 2014) also to INGOs. We categorised INGOs
that have less than four sectors of activity as task-specific and the rest
(four or more) as general-purpose organisations.
The analysis showed that policy scope of the organisation was particu-
larly significant for IGOs. General-purpose IGOs were more likely to
relate themselves to the pandemic. The response rate of general-
purpose IGOs was 91% (39/43), whereas that of task-specific IGOs was
43% (63/145). This difference is statistically significant (p= 0.004).
Amongst INGOs, the difference between general-purpose (84%, 58/69),
and task-specific INGOs (86%, 155/181) was statistically insignificant
(p= 0.84) and it went against the hypothesis.
From a rational choice perspective, we also hypothesized that organis-
ations whose tasks had to do with combating epidemics would be more
likely to respond to COVID-19. IOs tasked to fight health-related
issues would be an example, but it is important to note that epidemics
have wide effects on societies, for example through their economic
impact. Therefore, we used an organisation’s prior behaviour as a
proxy: it could be assumed that IOs which responded to previous viral
diseases are more likely to respond to this one as well. Therefore, we
coded which IOs responded to previous major epidemics taking place
after the turn of the twenty-first century (severe acute respiratory syn-
drome [SARS] in 2003, Influenza A H1N5 [bird flu] in 2007, H1N1
[swine flu] in 2009, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome [MERS] in
2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika virus in 2015-2016, HIV/AIDS). The results
confirm the hypothesis: both IGOs and INGOs that responded to
Table 1. Mentions of COVID-19 on the organisations’
websites.
Type of organisation Proportion of organisations
INGOs 88% (220/250)
IGOs 60% (151/252)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 9
epidemics in the past were more likely to relate to COVID-19, and the
associations were statistically significant in both cases (p< 0.001).
On the other hand, the comparison to earlier viral diseases highlights
the overwhelming attention that COVID-19 has attracted among all IOs,
also those who ignored previous health-related phenomena. While only a
minority (48%) of IGOs responded to at least one of the above-men-
tioned epidemics, now more than a half (55%) of those who ignored pre-
vious viral diseases reacted to COVID-19 one way or another. This
implies that conforming to what others do, predicted by new institution-
alism, best explains IOs’behaviour.
The characteristics of IOs that best predict whether and how an organ-
isation responded to the pandemic also suggest that conformism is the
best explanation for IOs’conduct in the crisis that COVID-19 caused
(Tables 2 and 3). In the tables we report Cramer’s V, a measure of associ-
ation on a scale 0–1 between the two variables, calculated from the under-
lying 2 × 2 contingency table (where 0 means no association between the
variables, and 1 means complete association). The tables report on corre-
lations between six types of responses by three variables: size, policy
scope, response to past epidemics. They also report the pvalue calculated
by Fisher’s exact test.
Amongst IGOs, bigger organisations and those that have responded to
previous epidemics were more likely to respond to COVID-19 in any of
the types listed in the table. Furthermore, general-purpose IGOs were
more likely to react by sharing third-party knowledge, giving material
Table 2. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by different types of IGOs.
Type of response
Size (small vs
large)
Policy scope (task-specific
vs general-purpose)
Responded to previous
epidemics (Yes vs No)
Symbolic statements 0.294
pvalue <
0.001
0.110
pvalue 0.094
0.391
pvalue < 0.001
Sharing third party
knowledge
0.33
pvalue <
0.001
0.211
pvalue 0.001
0.381
pvalue < 0.001
Material support 0.353
pvalue <
0.001
0.228
pvalue < 0.001
0.327
pvalue < 0.001
Running educational &
awareness raising projects
0.349
pvalue <
0.001
0.213
pvalue 0.001
0.38
pvalue < 0.001
Issuing guidelines 0.436
pvalue <
0.001
0.02
pvalue 0.852
0.317
pvalue < 0.001
Producing knowledge 0.372
pvalue <
0.001
0.13
pvalue 0.041
0.337
pvalue < 0.001
10 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
support, running educational and awareness raising projects and produ-
cing knowledge (Table 2).
The importance of an organisation’s resources is also visible when
considering INGOs (Table 3). While the likelihood that an INGO
engages in symbolic legitimation is not significantly associated with the
organisation’s characteristics, a bigger size, large policy scope, and
response to past epidemics all have a significant association with the
organisation providing material support. Furthermore, an INGO’s size
and reacting to previous epidemics also increases the likelihood that it
launches educational and awareness raising projects. All these associ-
ations are to some extent capacity issues.
Overall, rather than policy scope, both IGOs’and INGOs’engagement
with the COVID-19 pandemic correlates particularly with their capacity.
To put it simply, regardless of the IOs’primary scope, they responded to
the pandemic one way or another, depending on how much they could
invest resources into it. If nothing that can be categorised as behavioural
legitimation, an organisation used the opportunity to make itself visible
in the pandemic centred public discourse by resorting to symbolic
legitimation.
Types of symbolic legitimation
As an indication of a concerted response to the COVID-19 pandemic,
IOs seem to perform behavioural legitimation if their resources allow
it, but various forms of symbolic legitimation show conformism in the
face of the crisis even clearer. On the basis of rational choice theory,
we expected to see that IGOs differed from INGOs and general-
purpose from task-specific IOs in how they resorted to symbolic legitima-
tion. The results of empirical analyses showed, however, that the differ-
ences between IOs were small. Different types of IOs acted very
Table 3. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by different types of INGOs.
Type of response Size Policy scope
Response to past
epidemics
Symbolic statements 0.148 (0.021) 0.043 (0.569) 0.189 (0.004)
Sharing third party knowledge 0.058 (0.361) 0.068 (0.28) 0.115 (0.086)
Material support 0.261 (<0.001) 0.236 (<0.001) 0.276 (<0.001)
Running educational & awareness raising
projects
0.156 (0.014) 0.033 (0.604) 0.192 (0.003)
Issuing guidelines 0.135 (0.045) 0.113 (0.088) 0.076 (0.232)
Producing knowledge 0.032 (0.656) 0.033 (0.605) 0.243 (<0.001)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 11
similarly, conforming to evolving worldwide norms regarding symbolic
responses to the pandemic.
In going through the data, we identified three types of statements
representing symbolic legitimation: (1) statements of the organisation’s
importance (‘We help solve the crisis’), (2) statements reminding of the
organisation’s mission (‘We are important despite the crisis’), and state-
ments of the organisation’s compliance with some national or inter-
national COVID-19 related regulations (‘We comply’).
Let us take a press release of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(4 June 2020) as an example of the first type, ‘We help solve the crisis’:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has so far delivered more
than 250 consignments to 80 countries with supplies to help fight against
the COVID-19 pandemic [ …]“One hundred and twenty countries turned
to us for help. We mounted the biggest operation of assistance in the
history of the IAEA,”said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.
“This is emergency assistance and the effort is going to continue. I am encoura-
ging countries and entities in a position to do so to contribute in this endea-
vour.”[…] the IAEA is also providing personal protective equipment (PPE)
and offering webinars and video guidance for health and laboratory pro-
fessionals on sample collection and processing.
What we see here is behavioural legitimation (through provision of
material support, webinars and guidance) linked with symbolic legitima-
tion, evident in the press release highlighting the significance of their
effort, sustainability and reliability of their organisation, and their auth-
ority as a source of expertise and guidance. The IAEA is portrayed as a
responsive organisation, which is ready to help when needed and
which is also perceived by others as such: ‘One hundred and twenty
countries turned to us for help.’
Similar claims about playing important roles in mitigating the crisis are
made not only by other IGOs but also INGOs, as seen from the below
quote from Wikimedia foundation (https://wikimediafoundation.org/
covid19/#section-1):
How we can help in this time of uncertainty? Everything that happens in the
world happens on Wikipedia. And when things happen, we know the world
looks our way for clear, neutral, and reliable information. We honor this
responsibility every day, and its importance has only been amplified by the
unprecedented global COVID-19 pandemic. In this challenging time, our
utmost priority has been and will continue to be keeping Wikipedia online
and available for the world. Wikipedia will be there for students who are learn-
ing at home, people who are sheltering in place, and anyone who needs a
12 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
trusted source of unbiased information. Throughout these troubling times,
knowledge must and will remain open for all.
The excerpt exemplifies symbolic legitimation, where the INGO stresses
not only their eagerness to help in this crisis, but also the crucial role they
play as a reliable source of information.
The second type of symbolic legitimation, ‘We are important despite
the crisis,’comprises statements reminding of the organisation’s
mission. The following statement of the Food and Agriculture Organiz-
ation of the United Nations (14 April 2020) is one example:
While the eyes of the world are on the novel coronavirus, East Africa continues
to struggle with another crisis of biblical proportions: growing swarms of rave-
nous locusts. Both crises are extraordinary in scale, and both foes multiply so
quickly that governments are struggling to contain them. But times of crisis
are also times of innovation and collaboration. And just like scientists
around the world are racing to find ways to contend with COVID-19, inter-
national researchers have joined forces with FAO to create new tools to stay
one step ahead of the itinerant locusts. Such tools are becoming even more rel-
evant as restrictions associated with COVID-19 are posing new obstacles for
response teams.
Here, the organisation refers to the COVID-19 pandemic to underscore
the organisation’s resilience in the face of the pandemic and ability to
perform despite the crisis, and to better visualise the issues the organis-
ation addresses and the scale of its efforts by using the COVID-19 pan-
demic as a comparison.
In a similar vein, the INGO Waterkeepers highlights the continued
importance of their work at the time of the pandemic: ‘Waterkeepers con-
tinue to fight for clean water, even in the face of COVID-19.’(22 April
2020)
The third type of symbolic legitimation, ‘We comply’, comprise state-
ments of the organisation’s compliance with national or international
COVID-19 related regulations and guidelines. For example, on its
website the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) states on 13 March 2020 that it ‘implements COVID-19
related measures’, highlighting that their director-general ‘adopted
several measures based on the new guidance announced by the Dutch
health authorities and the World Health Organisation’s characterisation
of the spread of the virus as a pandemic’, pertaining to contingency
staffing, meetings and travel. The adoption of measures was thus
justified through compliance with third-party guidelines and decisions,
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 13
rather than for example organisation’s own deliberation to ensure their
staffhealth and safety or economic feasibility.
INGOs also perform this type of symbolic legitimation, as seen from
the following quote by One Acre Fund (14 May 2020), highlighting the
importance of following official recommendations:
In all of the countries we serve, agriculture had been designated an essential
service, but for farmers to work unhindered, we needed to incorporate govern-
ment and World Health Organization guidelines on COVID-19 prevention
into our operations, especially in the field.
The above shows that organisations resort to different legitimation strat-
egies: ‘positive’legitimation in order to gain authority and/or resources
(exemplified by statements along the lines of ‘We help solve the crisis’
and ‘We are important despite the crisis’) versus blame avoidance strat-
egy, to prevent any loss of legitimacy (manifested in statements along the
lines of ‘We comply’). The observed legitimation practices reflect the
importance of different dimensions of legitimacy (Ossewaarde et al.
(2008)), such as the regulatory dimension in the case of ‘We comply’
and the output dimension in the case of ‘We help solve the crisis’.
Table 4 reports how prevalent different types of symbolic legitimation
were among IGOs and INGOs. Through various statements, organis-
ations explicitly related themselves to the global efforts of mitigating
the crisis, trying to persuade the public of the relevance of their organis-
ation in the new circumstances and to reassure their compliance with
new pandemic-related regulations. Considering that a significantly
larger share of INGOs than IGOs responded to the pandemic one way
or another, it is somewhat surprising that IGOs resorted to all types of
symbolic legitimation more commonly than INGOs. Since the research
literature in this area maintains that INGOs are very dependent on
their public image, this seems to suggest that a large proportion of
them engaged in projects categorised as behavioural legitimation, and
did not make a big deal out of it by emphasizing their role in managing
the crisis.
Table 4. Types of symbolic legitimation of IGOs and INGOs.
Type of symbolic legitimation
IGOs,
%
INGOs,
%pvalue
Statements of organisational importance to mitigating the crisis (‘We
help solve the crisis’)
31 18.4 0.000535
Statements reminding of the organisation’s mission 37.3 26.4 0.004011
Statements of the organisation’s compliance with some national or
international COVID-19 related regulations
22.6 9.6 3.69E-05
14 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Differences in types of symbolic legitimation between IOs of different
size and policy scope tell the same story of conformism that was discussed
in the previous section (see Tables 5 and 6). As seen in Table 5, big IGOs
tended to discuss their role in tackling the crisis and highlight the impor-
tance of their mission, even in the new, post-pandemic world –more
than declaring compliance with pandemic-related regulations and guide-
lines. Furthermore, IGOs that responded to pandemics in the past were
more likely than others to portray themselves as having an important
role in mitigating the crisis. This effect is possibly due to the larger
capacity of previously responding organisations, meaning that they
were better placed to provide additional pandemic-related services, and
larger PR resources, capable of producing more extensive pandemic-
dedicated publicity, going beyond short statements of compliance.
Among INGOs, size or response to past pandemics did not seem to
affect their symbolic legitimation choices (Table 6).
Policy scope did not seem to have an impact on types of symbolic legit-
imation either among IGOs or INGOs. As predicted by the neoinstitu-
tionalist theory, this implies that, conforming to a uniform response to
the crisis best explains the IOs’conduct. Unlike predicted in previous
research, task-specific organisations were not more likely than general-
Table 5. Types of symbolic legitimation among IGOs.
Type of symbolic legitimation Size Policy scope
Response to past
pandemics
Statement of organisational importance to
mitigating the crisis (‘We help solve the crisis’)
0.321 (<0.001) 0.102 (0.148) 0.358 (<0.001)
Statement reminding of the organisation’s
mission
0.397 (<0.001) 0.146 (0.025) 0.312 (<0.001)
Statement of the organisation’s compliance
with some national or international COVID-19
related regulations
0.131 (0.076) 0.027 (0.692) 0.21 (0.001)
Table 6. Types of symbolic legitimation among INGOs.
Type of symbolic legitimation Size Policy scope
Response to past
pandemics
Statement of organisational importance to
mitigating the crisis (‘We help solve the crisis’)
0.056 (0.413) 0.007 (0.912) 0.092 (0.148)
Statement reminding of the organisation’s
mission
0.078 (0.247) 0.086 (0.176) 0.109 (0.103)
Statement of the organisation’s compliance with
some national or international COVID-19
related regulations
0.09 (0.195) 0.08 (0.208) 0.169 (0.008)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 15
purpose organisations to stress their role in mitigating the effects of the
pandemic and solving other issues relevant for their target audiences.
Instead, general-purpose and task-specific organisations pursued
similar symbolic legitimation strategies, and they mostly did so by
appealing to the shared pandemic-induced problems, their own ability
to solve those problems, as well as the importance of their organisational
mission.
In some cases, the remarkable breadth and uniformity by which all
kinds of IOs responded to the pandemic also resulted in somewhat
absurd attempts to argue how and why an organisation is relevant
in the COVID-19 situation. For example, the International Cotton
Advisory Committee issued (22 June 2020) a ‘Huge Special Issue of
The ICAC Recorder [which] Focusses Exclusively on COVID-19 Pan-
demic’, with highlights including for example ‘Nearly 100 pages of
COVID-specific content from 25 cotton experts.’Another example of
this kind can be found at the International Pepper Community:
‘Black Pepper is widely acclaimed for its ability to boost the immune
system. Being an international agency in the field of pepper, we
think it is our moral responsibility to inform all about the great
support pepper can give in your fight against the Coronavirus.’As
the quote shows, the organisation re-packages their services as
fighting disease. By relating their work to COVID-19, the IO tries to
attach a new meaning to their activities, thereby implying that the lea-
dership considers the previously defined mission to not be sufficiently
significant, appropriate, or legitimate in the new situation.
To take another example, like many other IOs, the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shared third party information on
COVID-19. As a Vienna-based organisation, they shared the ‘Latest
information from the Austrian and Viennese authorities’, such as
‘Advice from the VIC Medical Service: What to do if you have respir-
atory symptoms and are concerned about having COVID-19, If you
test positive for COVID-19, If your family members test positive for
COVID-19, Taking care of yourself and your family, Is it allergy or
is it COVID-19?’It is understandable that such information is
highly relevant for the staffof the organisation. However, it seems
unlikely that any external stakeholders would access the IAEA’s
office in search of this information and would not seek advice from
Austrian medical authorities. So, the usefulness of publishing such
third-party information on IAEA’s website can be questioned and it
appears to primarily serve legitimation.
16 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Conclusion and discussion
In this study we have tested different hypotheses to account for the pat-
terns found in IOs’legitimation work triggered by the COVID-19 pan-
demic. From a rational choice perspective, we assumed that differences
between the conduct of various types of organisations could be explained
by their varying interests and need for legitimation. Hence, since it has
been argued that INGOs are more dependent on their public image,
we expected them to be more likely to use the COVID-19 pandemic as
a legitimation opportunity than IGOs. We also expected to find that
general-purpose organisations are more than task-specific organisations
engaged in publicising their role in the pandemic-induced crisis. We
also hypothesized that among task-specific IOs, those whose tasks are
directly related to the pandemic are more likely to take an active role
in the crisis than others. Furthermore, we expected to see that task-
specific organisations are more likely to legitimize their activities regard-
ing the pandemic with reference to their purpose, whereas general-
purpose organisations are more likely to legitimize themselves with refer-
ence to universally shared principles such as democracy, participation,
transparency, and rights protection. On the other hand, from a neoinsti-
tutionalist perspective it could be assumed that IOs act relatively homo-
geneously in the face of the situation in which the entire world’s attention
is centred on the pandemic, meaning that other issues are left in its
shadow. Therefore, from this perspective it could be hypothesized that
IOs respond to the situation quite uniformly, aligning themselves with
the norms that become prevalent and hegemonic, using the resources
at their disposal to be seen as actors whose activities help mitigate the
effects of the pandemic. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the more
resources an IO has, the more likely it responds to the COVID-19 pan-
demic in various ways.
The analysis gave some support to hypotheses derived from a rational
choice perspective. The INGOs’response rate was significantly higher
than that of IGOs. In line with rational choice assumptions, general-
purpose IGOs were more likely to react to the pandemic than task-
specific IGOs. On the whole, however, an organisation’s resources were
the best predictor for its conduct in response to the crisis: the more an
IO could invest in being visible on this front, the more likely it was to
engage in both behavioural and symbolic legitimation of all kinds.
In some cases, this eagerness to make themselves visible and to appear
relevant, led to absurd rhetoric. This is in accordance with
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 17
neoinstitutionalist scholarship, which maintains that organisations are
conformist in their behaviour. Being part of the same global organis-
ational field, IOs want to be seen as professional, authoritative, and legit-
imate actors, competing for public attention and recognition with several
other organisations. According to existing research, recent decades have
witnessed a growing need among both IGOs and INGOs for managing
their visibility and public image. Based on his study, Ecker-Ehrhardt
(2018a,2018b) argues that self-legitimation via managing public dis-
course has become an organisational priority for IGOs in the face of
increased levels of societal awareness, activism, and contestation by
civil society actors. Consequently, IGOs have been expanding their com-
munication departments to respond to the pressures towards insti-
tutional visibility. In a similar vein, Stroup and Wong (2017) argue
that INGOs struggle to achieve status as leading INGOs in order to
achieve their social change goals. However, maintaining status makes
them avoid radical positions that might alienate policymakers or other
constituencies. Therefore, they tend to conform to embracing widely
shared views and principles.
In this instance, we do not think it is problematic to give some credit to
both rational choice and neoinstitutionalist theories, because they are not
necessarily contradictory. As Marshall W. Meyer (1987) notes, if it is com-
monly believed that an organisational action is a rational solution to a
problem, it can be considered as a rational choice regardless of its conse-
quences for efficiency. Similarly, an IO selflessly tackling the COVID-19
crisis within the available resources can be considered as a rational
choice from various viewpoints, although its actual effect can be negligible.
Our study has its limitations, primarily because of the challenges of
data collection. First, it is a website-based assessment, and we focused
on public legitimation strategies. It is possible that organisations intro-
duced various internal changes without publicising them –and that the
patterns of their internal strategies varied from their public legitimation
strategies –which could provide a different picture of organisational
responses to the pandemic. Second, we did not account for the role of
the organisational environment which could be an important factor in
organisational behaviour, e.g. relevant international and national insti-
tutions, network membership, and behaviour of their sponsors. Future
studies could fill these gaps and collect data through interviews. This
will help understand how (a) publicly visible responses relate to internal
organisational changes, and (b) the factors that shape organisational
behaviour in crises.
18 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland, project ‘Epistemic capital in
the synchronisation of national policies (EXTENDED): The effects of COVID-19’;
Kulttuurin ja Yhteiskunnan Tutkimuksen Toimikunta.
ORCID
Olga Ulybina http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-5658
Laia Pi Ferrer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8655-591X
Pertti Alasuutari http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4111-9641
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 21
Appendix A
Table A1. Collecting and coding data about international organisations.
Variable Operationalization Source of the data Coding scheme
Size of the
organisation
Number of staffonline directory
devex.com, Yearbook of
International
Organizations,
organisations’
webpages, annual
reports (IGOs)
For IGOs: 0 –less than
100 staff,1–100 staff
or more
NGO advisor information,
LinkedIn (INGOs)
For INGOs: 1- 1 to 10
staff,2-11to50staff,
3-51 to 200, 4- 201 to
500 staff, 5- 501 to
1000 staff, 6- 1001 to
5000, 7- 5001-10,000
staff, 8- more than
10,000 staff
Aims of the
organisation
Mention of health issues in
the aims of the
organisation
Yearbook of International
Organizations (IGOs)
0–Health issues NOT
mentioned, 1- health
issues mentionedNGO advisor information
(INGOs)
Policy scope of the
organisation
General purpose or task-
specific organisation*
Yearbook of International
Organizations (IGOs)
0–general purpose, 1-
task-specific
IGOs: coding on aims
NGO advisor information
(INGOs)
INGOs: coding based on
the amount of sectors
of activity
(classification
provided by NGO
advisor information)
Task-specific: 1–3
sectors of activity
General purpose: 4–15
sectors of activity
Funding sources of
the organisation (for
IGOs only)
Sources of funding
(member states or other)
Yearbook of International
Organizations; websites
of analysed IGOs
IGOs: 0 –a significant
share is funded
through contributions
of member states, 1 –
does not include or
includes insignificant
contributions of
member states
NGOs holding
consultative status
with the United
Nations Economic
and Social Council
(ECOSOC)
Non, General, Special and
Roster
Database of organisations
in Consultative Status
with ECOSOC and other
accreditations (INGOs
only)
0–Non, 1- General, 2-
Special, 3- Roster
Headquarters location Location of the
organisation’s
headquarters
NGO advisor information
(INGOs only)
1- Europe, 2- North
America, 3- Asia, 4-
Oceania, 5- Africa, 6-
South America
Year of foundation Year of foundation of the
organisation
NGO advisor information
(INGOs only)
1- before 1975, 2- from
1975 to 1999, 3- from
2000 onwards
(Continued)
22 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Table A1. Continued.
Variable Operationalization Source of the data Coding scheme
Response to previous
pandemics
Does the organisation
mention any of the
following pandemics on
its website: Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS) in 2003, Influenza
A H5N1 (bird flu) in 2007
(‘influenza’,‘bird flu’,
‘H5N1’), H1N1 (swine flu)
in 2009 (‘swine’, H1N1),
Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome (MERS) in
2012 (MERS), Ebola in
2014 (‘Ebola’), Zika virus
in 2015–2016 (‘Zika’),
HIV/AIDS
Websites of the analysed
organisations
* All previous pandemics
were searched only
prior to 2020 (2019
inclusive) to avoid data
contamination, as past
pandemics have often
been mentioned in
relation to COVID-19
0–None of the previous
pandemic mentioned,
1 -at least one of the
previous pandemics
mentioned
* The typology is based on Lenz et al., 2014.
Table A2. Collecting data about organisational responses to COVID-19 crisis.
Type of response Operationalization Examples
Statement of organisational
importance to mitigating
the crisis (‘We help
solving the crisis’)
Statement explaining/justifying
the organisation’s importance
to mitigating the crisis.
IGO: ‘CottonStopsCovid’. Keshav
Kranthi, Joy Das, Rakesh Kumar,
Mike McCue, Renuka Dhandapani,
Kater Hake, Sandhya Kranthi,
D. Blaise and Kai Hughes. 2020. The
role of cotton in face masks.
Brochure. ICAC, Washington, DC.
May 2020. (International Cotton
Advisory Committee)
‘Over 100 countries requested
support from the IAEA in detecting
and controlling the increasing
number of COVID-19 infections,
including with real time RT–PCR.
The IAEA, in part through funding
contributions from Member States,
provided a range of support, from
diagnostic equipment and
protective gear to sharing of
expertise and training.’
(International Atomic Energy
Agency)
‘In the context of the ongoing COVID-
19 pandemic and the attendant
economic crisis, a number of
leading UNIDROIT instruments may
be of interest to a wide array of
actors currently facing serious
challenges to address contractual
disruptions and to rebuild the
economy in the post COVID-19
scenario.’(International Institute
for the Unification of Private Law)
‘The Cold Chain: A logistical
challenge at the heart of the
(Continued)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 23
Table A2. Continued.
Type of response Operationalization Examples
distribution of the COVID-19
vaccine’(International Institute of
Refrigeration)
INGO: ‘Praekelt.org was uniquely
positioned to respond to the
COVID-19 pandemic after 12 years
of experience in digital health’
(Praekelth foundation).
‘The current pandemic presents a
unique opportunity for IDC and its
members to further support
adapting ATD to the realities of
Covid-19, and managing releases
from immigration detention into
ATD. More importantly, lessons
learned from processes, challenges,
and impacts during the health
crisis, will be key to securing the
sustainability of promising
responses beyond Covid-19, and
showcasing how migration can be
governed without immigration
detention’(International detention
coalition)
‘We are important despite
the crisis’
Statement reminding of the
organisation’s mission
IGO: ‘With the COVID-19 emergency,
East Africa continues to struggle
with another crisis –the locust
upsurge.’(Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations)
‘In this time of worldwide distress …
due to the COVID-19 pandemic, if
the benefits that the OIML –
together with its solid international
legal metrology framework –can
contribute to deliver confidence
and eliminate a degree of worry,
then this is a good thing.’
(International Organization of Legal
Metrology)
‘Now more than ever is the time for
bold international cooperation to
bridge the energy access gap and
place sustainable energy at the
heart of economic stimulus and
recovery measures. IRENA is
committed to scale up action with
its global membership’
(International Renewable Energy
Agency)
INGO: ‘Diseases do not quarantine.
Blood centres are empty, which
means that someone will be left
without a life-saving blood
transfusion. #STAY A
DONOR’(Donorsearch)
‘We comply’Statement of the organisation’s
compliance with some
IGO: ‘All Rome-based FAO staffis now
working remotely from home in
(Continued)
24 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Table A2. Continued.
Type of response Operationalization Examples
national or international
COVID-19 related regulations
accordance with guidelines
provided by the Italian
Government.’(Food and
Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations)
‘Based on recommendations of WHO,
the IOM issued a circular letter in
Jan 2020 …’ (International
Maritime Organization)
INGO: ‘Civil Rights Defenders in the
Time of Corona. As an organisation,
we started making contingency
plans and preparing for business
continuity in late January. We are
following the Public Health Agency
in Sweden and WHO advice and
guidance’(Civil rights defender)
‘The instructions from public
authorities are being followed very
strictly and life in the groups, and
particularly in our communities in
France, Europe, the Americas and
in Africa, is organised in such a way
as to respect all efforts to prevent
the spread of the virus’(Emmaus
International).
Providing material support Statement about or other
evidence of providing material
support to third parties, in
relation to COVID-19 crisis
IGO: ‘…working to establish a
special fund, the Africa Coffee
Facility (ACF), to assist in
addressing the challenges of
Africa’scoffee value chain. Work on
the ACF was now being refocused
to take into account the response
to covid-19’(International Coffee
Organization)
‘We are ramping up our field
program to: Provide smallholder
farmers and herders with seeds,
tools, livestock feed …’ (Food and
Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations)
INGO: ‘During the coronavirus
pandemic, Diakonia has also
donated disinfectant, gloves and
masks to help restrict the spread of
COVID-19’(Diakonia).
Running educational &
awareness raising
projects
Statement about or other
evidence of providing
awareness building program,
such as webinars, online
teaching, or similar projects
IGO: Virtual Academy to support
police learning during COVID 19
(Interpol)
‘an Online International Training
Programme on “Poverty Alleviation
through Micro Finance: State of Art
in COVID-19 Period”’ (African-Asian
Rural Development Organization)
‘The Union of OIC News Agencies
(UNA) concluded on Monday a
virtual workshop for the staffers of
(Continued)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 25
Table A2. Continued.
Type of response Operationalization Examples
news agencies, radio stations, TV
channels, newspapers and
electronic platforms in the Islamic
world, on “Methods of vetting
news during crises and spread of
rumors (COVID-19)”.’(Islamic
Broadcasting Union)
INGO: ‘Many National Scout
Organizations have developed
programming, resources and
activities to continue Scouting at
Home during and after COVID-19.
Check out the collection of
materials that NSOs can use and
adapt to engage their
members’(World Organisation of
the Scout Movement)
Issuing guidelines Statement about or other
evidence of providing some
professional guidelines or
recommendations in relation
to COVID-19 crisis
IGO: ‘IAEA Issues Guidelines for
Nuclear Medicine Departments
during COVID-19 Pandemic’
(International Atomic Energy
Agency)
‘WCO Guidance on how to
communicate during a crisis’
(World Customs Organization)
‘Handbook for CAAs on the
management of aviation safety
risks related to COVID-19’
(International Civil Aviation
Organization)
INGO: ‘We have also created COVID-
19 response guidelines in Hindi and
English for our teams to help them
and their communities stay healthy
and out of harm’s way’(Pratham)
Producing knowledge Statement about or other
evidence of producing new
knowledge in relation to
COVID-19 crisis
IGO: ‘New dashboard launched to
help Commonwealth Governments
tackle Coronavirus’,
Commonwealth COVID-19 analysis
page https://www.
thecommonwealth.io/
Covid19analysis/ (Commonwealth
Secretariat)
‘CABI scientists have conducted new
research highlighting the impact of
COVID-19 pandemic on food
security in Kenya and Uganda’
(CABI)
INGO: ‘Deepening Resilience in Rural
Communities: Results from Root
Capital’s Second COVID-19 Survey’
(Root capital)
Sharing (third party)
knowledge
Statement about or other
evidence of sharing knowledge
from third parties, in relation to
COVID-19 crisis
IGO: sharing resources from member
states and partner international
organisations (https://www.icao.
int/covid/Pages/Partner-Resources.
aspx) (International Civil Aviation
(Continued)
26 O. ULYBINA ET AL.
Table A2. Continued.
Type of response Operationalization Examples
Organization)
INGO: ‘Number of people confirmed
to have or have had COVID-19,
worldwide [map]
This map gets updated multiple
times each day with data by Johns
Hopkins. To zoom, use the zoom
buttons or hold CTRL while
scrolling’(Handicap international)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 27
