The Role of the WHO in a Pandemic: The Need for a More Adaptive Form of Leadership?

17 September 2021, 13h45 – 14h15 (Central European Time (UTC+1)

Research cooperation Transformative Effects of Globalisation in Law summoned experts to give various panels examining the numerous consequences of the pandemic and its transformative effects in relation to:

• boundaries and international cooperation;
• transformative effects on markets;
• transformation of institutions.

H-POD’s co-directors, Jean-Louis Denis and Catherine Régis as well as Miriam Cohen and Pierre Larouche are invited to join the discussion. On September 17, they will discuss their paper on the role of the World Health Organization and its leadership during a pandemic.

During a pandemic of such scale and severity as Covid-19, there is demand for proactive and decisive political leadership (Ansell, Boin& Hart, 2014). A pandemic is a perfect example of an extreme context that also creates an ambiguous space, bundling together individuals, organizations, communities and whole societies. Leadership in such extreme contexts and ambiguous spaces has become a pre-eminent question in political and sociological literature (Hannah &Uhl-Bien, 2009;Ospina et al., 2020). Pandemics also reveal a high degree of interdependence among developed and developing countries in facing the associated health, economic and more broadly societal challenges. We argue in this paper that pandemics require that political and public health leadership, on the one hand,be very focussed and assertive (Boin, Stern, Sundelius, 2016; Ansell,Boin& Hart, 2014) at the international level, while on the other hand, ensure the mobilization of leaders at the local community and national levels (Denis, Langley, Sergi, 1992). In order to reconcile these different requirements to effectively tame the pandemic, a new form of meta-systemic leadership is needed – one that combines clarity of goals and advice, solid expertise and effective networking with national leaders – in order to ensure the legitimacy and effectiveness of global public health interventions, like those of international organizations.

https://www.lawandglobalisation.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/trasformative_effects_2021.pdf#page=9

To attend the conference and for further information regarding the event, please visit: https://www.lawandglobalisation.nl/tegl-conference-2021/

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