• Prof. Dr. Kerstin Martens
• Prof. Dr. Alexandra Kaasch
• Dr. Dennis Niemann
• Dr. David Krogmann
• Ms. Anh Tran
• Mr. Heiner Salomon

Abstract

Despite being founded with explicit goals and delegated to particular responsibilities by states, intergovernmental organizations (IOs) have demonstrated to be dynamic actors that constantly (re-)construct and (re-)formulate their organizational goals, agendas, and strategies. These practices, in which IOs autonomously make changes in their institutional components, are puzzling, given that IOs are claimed to be controlled by their member states and prefer stability to change. To improve our understanding of why and how IOs undertake institutional changes, the central research questions of this dissertation ask what motivates IOs to initiate changes and to what extent IOs are able to execute changes to move away from their existing institutional settings. The research is operationalized based on a theoretical framework that juxtaposes two axes of institutional changes in IOs: Source and scope of change. Both exogenous and endogenous forces are considered independent variables that shape the source and scope of change. Applying this theoretical framework, this dissertation provides a detailed analysis of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) institutional changes as a global health actor. While the OECD was not established as a health actor, it has significantly advanced its engagements in global health governance and shown prompt and proactive reactions to emerging health issues in recent decades. This development, however, remains a black box with the research gap on what motivated the OECD to become and remain a global health actor and what shaped the extent of the deviations the OECD made from its institutional settings given at its birth. On this basis, this dissertation shows the patterns of the OECD’s institutional changes. Mixed methods are employed for the analyses, involving quantitative and qualitative text analysis as well as expert interviews.

The key findings are expanded in three articles, which respectively investigate a distinctive within-case of the OECD’s changes as a global health actor, namely, the mandate expansion, the shift in the policy discourse, and the adjustment in the contingency role. The three within-case analyses suggest: First, the OECD is a highly dynamic health actor that strategically designs and materializes institutional changes in its institutional settings. Second, the OECD leverages exogenous developments in global health governance to initiate change, suggesting its competence in turning external conditions into windows of opportunity to pursue its own interests. Third, the OECD’s endogenous saliences, particularly the exclusive orientation towards member states and economic growth, concurrently serve as the driving forces to facilitate the OECD to materialize changes and the constraint of advancing the scope of changes beyond the boundaries defined by its organizational attributes. Taken together, these findings contribute to advancing our understanding of why and how IOs generate changes in their institutional settings by partly confirming existing theories and revealing novel aspects. This dissertation contributes to the study of institutional changes in IOs by showing variations of changes IOs implement, providing analytical models for evaluating changes in IOs’ mandates, policy discourse, and contingency role, and informing the shaping power of IOs’ endogenous characteristics and exogenous conditions on the process of their changes.