The rise of international organizations (IOs) as public authorities in global governance has reinvigorated the debate about IOs’ legitimacy. Efforts to address legitimacy concerns raised by IOs’ increased role have drawn on their perceived epistemic strength, suggesting that the rationality and soundness of their responses to governance needs lend them legitimacy. Yet IOs’ recent crisis responses have cast a shadow on this popular view. Using the state as the foil, this Article aims to cast light on the relationship between IOs’ institutional learning and legitimacy by investigating IOs’ intervention in recent transnational emergencies. It advances a two-fold argument.

First, IOs’ institutional learning is limited because it lacks the democratic reflexive and executive modes of learning, which have grown out of the quest for constitutional legitimacy in state formation and underpinned the state’s epistemic strength. Second, given that IOs’ institutional limits and the attendant limited learning capacity originate in their non-sovereign constitutional status, to improve their institutional learning on the model of constitutional legitimacy in the state, IOs will need to be reframed on a constitutional basis— the required societal foundation of which is still eluding the current condition of global governance. Such a constitutional project only exacerbates IOs’ legitimacy malaise without re-establishing their epistemic superiority or delivering legitimacy for global governance.

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