Operational claims, normative trade-offs, and the legitimation of international organizations

To contend with rising contestation, international organizations (IOs) increasingly engage in the politics of legitimation. IO legitimation aims to accentuate IOs’ legitimacy warrants all the while accounting for their legitimacy deficits. Focusing on how IOs justify legitimacy deficits, this study identifies a distinct type of IO legitimacy claims: operational claims, which differ from normative claims commonly discussed in IO legitimation research. Specifically, it zooms on to one type of operational claim centering around the idea of trade-off. That is, IOs highlight trade-offs between institutional standards of legitimacy in response to public criticism. Failure to meet one norm is justified by the imperative to meet another that is, from IOs’ perspective, more befitting of their organizational identity. The empirical analysis comprises five cases where IOs strategically invoked different trade-off types for legitimation purposes. This research contributes to IO legitimation research by exposing the blind spot about operational claims, and more substantively, by fleshing out a common type of operational claim that features large in IO legitimation accounts.