Democratically Deficient Organizations

With Julian Morris and Roger Bate, I have written a short paper about Democratically Deficient Organizations (DoDOs). We focus on the World Health Organisation and the massive NGOs that fund it.

 

In tobacco control and pandemic governance, foundation funding, WHO authority, NGO advocacy, and academic research reinforce one another to produce policy consensus insulated from scrutiny. Law & economics frameworks help explain the result: incentives favor persistence over performance. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has not accelerated global declines in smoking, while discouraging harm-reduction approaches that have succeeded in countries such as Sweden. Proposals to expand WHO authority in pandemic preparedness risk replicating the same institutional failures revealed during COVID-19.

The problem is not insufficient resources, but weak accountability. The brief proposes reforms to restore it: rebalance WHO funding toward assessed contributions, strengthen transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, open governance processes, embrace harm reduction, and return policymaking authority to domestic democratic institutions. Without such changes, the continued expansion of the DoDO model will deepen existing failures—with consequences measured in human lives.

 

You can read the whole thing for free. I also interviewed Roger for the IEA podcast last week...

 

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