The ties that bind global governance: Using media-reported events to disentangle the global interorganizational network in a global pandemic

This article disentangles the global interorganizational network by analyzing the ties of international actors – comprising multinational companies, intergovernmental organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations. The onset of COVID-19 is a rare opportunity to explore how this network has evolved in an exogenous event. Using a unique GDELT big dataset of events reported by the world’s media, we extract and analyze the interorganizational interactions of international actors before and after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the COVID-19 outbreak was a public health emergency of international concern. Adopting an exploratory and descriptive approach at multiple levels of analysis, we draw on the theory of networks to uncover the fragmented, polycentric, and complex characteristics of the global interorganizational network. Our study highlights the use of media-reported events and the Goldstein scale as means to unpack the difficult-to-capture relational dynamics of international actors, which can help in theory development of the global interorganizational network that is crucial for collective action to address societal grand challenges.