Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the official records of past Executive Board and World Health Assembly meetings, the paper will reflect on the contemporary rules and practices, which where observed (or otherwise noted) in the course of an on-going ethnography at these core sites of WHO's annual policy cycle.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will reflect on the contemporary (policy-making) rules and practices, which where observed (or otherwise noted) in the course of an on-going ethnography at the core sites of WHO's annual policy cycle - at Executive Board and World Health Assembly meetings in particular. This will bring some historical depth to the synchronic ethnographic account and promises furthermore to produce insights that can be used for constructive criticism in the contemporary debates on WHO reform, which include discussions about the reform of WHO's governance bodies.

In order to reconstruct the historical rules and practices, the paper draws on the official records (e.g. verbatim and summary records) of past meetings of the Executive Board and of the World Health Assembly at which the desirability of changing the then current rules and practices was discussed. Overall, the paper attempts to tease out how stable the rules and practices have proven and how contested/accepted they appeared over time. This includes a discussion of the following questions in particular, which are also hinted at in the paper title: What problems of the WHO governance bodies where identified in the past and what (positive) alternatives where envisioned for the future? Have these discussions changed over time or do the governance bodies still face "the same" problems? Finally, what contemporary rules and practices are the (un)intended consequence of past reforms?