Time frames: Crisis expertise and rapid response mechanisms

Jan Eijking discusses the key arguments from his new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article here - Time frames: Crisis expertise and rapid response mechanisms

For 79 years now, the Doomsday Clock, currently set to “89 seconds to midnight” (suggesting we are “perilously close to the precipice”), has been telling us that we are running out of time. All the time. It is a stark reminder of the intimate connection between invocations of crisis and emergency, on the one hand, and specific expressions of time, timing, and time pressure, on the other. Another connection receives less attention: in politics, both crisis and time get articulated with the help of expert assessment and advice. In the case of the Doomsday Clock, it is the non-governmental Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that issues it. To declare Covid-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”, short PHEIC, the World Health Organization (WHO) turned to the advice of in-house and third-party specialists. 

But how do expertise and the time-frames of crisis relate? How do the pressures we experience in times of crisis affect the production and use of expert knowledge? Expertise is typically understood as specialist knowledge that requires deep familiarity with highly specific knowledge, and expert advice thus as requiring slow, careful deliberation. Yet since slowness is precisely the opposite of the high speed of crisis governance, we should expect time pressure to affect expertise in some way. In the context of a new Review of International Studies special issue on sources of expert authority beyond objectivity—edited by Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Juanita Uribe, and Leandro Gabriel Montes Ruiz—my article “Time Frames: Crisis Expertise and Rapid Response Mechanisms” asks: what happens to the making and use of expertise when demands for “timely” knowledge arise in global governance?

Much excellent work has been done on the role of time and timing in international relations, as well as on the construction of crisis as a matter of mobilising particular chronologies and timing imperatives (from Kimberly Hutchings’ Time and World Politics to RIS editor Andrew Hom’s International Relations and the Problem of Time). Building on this work, my article investigates a crisis governance instrument that has become widespread among many major international organisations of the United Nations system: so-called “rapid response mechanisms”, short RRMs. Since operationalising “time pressure” is complicated and possibly even controversial, I turn to RRMs as observable expressions of how international organisations themselves operationalise time pressure. The article first shows when and how RRMs first emerged, and with what aims. I then zoom in on two RRMs in particular, at the WHO and the World Food Programme (WFP) respectively.  

The rise of rapid response

After the end of the Cold War, international organisations introduced a growing number of rapid response, rapid assessment, and related mechanisms as part of broader institutional reforms and innovations. The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated the adoption of RRMs across different international organisations. Crisis seems, in other words, to directly inspire the institutionalisation of rapid response. Today, the G7 has a Rapid Response Mechanism to better tackle “challenges to democracy and the rules-based international order”; UNICEF has operates multiple rapid response teams, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and the FAO has a rapid risk assessment mechanism for animal health emergencies. 

Based on my article, let me briefly introduce the case of the WHO as an example. The WHO issues guidance for “rapid risk assessment” as part of its Emergency Response Framework (ERF), which is a regularly updated document specifying institutional procedure and best practice to enable the WHO to detect public health threats early on. Under the ERF, the WHO enables rapid funds release within 24 hours of labelling a public health event as an emergency. For the WHO, the key is “preparedness”: having standardised institutional mechanisms in place that are both flexible enough to map onto various emergencies that may arise, and specific enough to assign clear decision-making responsibilities. 

But the crux is, of course, what is an emergency? This is where expert analysis is crucial. Rapid risk assessment—the WHO’s RRM—is conceptualised as a high-speed version of “public health situation analysis”. This is incredibly demanding, relying on input from regional and headquarters experts, in collaboration with local country offices, to detect, verify, and assess health threats in “real time”. WHO officers need to collate, coordinate, and—most importantly—triangulate all of this information, under intense time pressure, to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the seriousness of a given situation.

Implementing an RRM thus directly affects how expert judgement and advice gets produced, and how it actually comes to guide policy. This plays out differently in different cases, but my analysis identifies three broad shifts associated with RRM-based claims to timeliness. First, authority increasingly attaches not to credentialed individuals but to infrastructures and standardised procedures. Surveillance systems, modelling platforms, and response protocols come to embody expertise, more so than identifiable experts or advisory committees. Second, RRMs tend to privilege large, homogeneous datasets that can be processed quickly, rather than forms of knowledge that require consultation, interpretation, and debate among diverse experts. Third, imperatives for “timely” knowledge streamline expert selection: rather than drawing on external specialists, international organisations recruit internal experts who are familiar with organisational procedures and can be mobilised without delay.

Expert authority reconstituted

How international organisations invoke the authority of experts to pursue “timely” crisis governance, in short, differs significantly from other contexts of expert governance. Analytically, this requires that we approach RRMs not merely as technical tools. More than that, RRMs reorganise how expert knowledge is produced, validated, and mobilised under crisis conditions. Under the rubric of timeliness, expert knowledge production as we normally know it is too “slow”—but rather than dispensing with the legitimising force of expertise, RRMs allow international organisations to retain expert authority by recasting its shape. In this sense, RRMs exemplify how expertise in global governance draws from sources beyond objectivity pure and simple.

The point of my analysis, importantly, is not to argue that, say, humanitarian disaster somehow did not require responsible organisations to act as quickly as possible. Of course it does. The question I am instead interested in is what it means for governance responses to be “sped up”, whether at the stage of knowledge production or the stage of deployment.

RRMs clearly enhance the capacity of IOs to monitor developments and react rapidly in crisis situations. At the same time, they raise important normative and political questions. By reducing opportunities for contestation, external scrutiny, and reflexive judgment, RRM-centred expertise may weaken safeguards against expert overconfidence and institutional blind spots. In brief, understanding crisis governance requires close attention not only to the involvement of experts themselves, but to the institutionalised temporal horizons based on which expert authority gets produced, legitimised, and exercised.

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526101727

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