We illustrate these empirically by comparing four policy cases from the IMF (capital account liberalization and poverty reduction) and the World Bank (anti-corruption and sustainable agriculture).

We introduce four degrees of resilience: endurance, elasticity, flexibility, and fragility.

This is due to a better knowledge of the organizational culture and greater norm ownership among IO staff.

Drawing on informal governance, localization, and translation approaches in IO and norms research, we contend that norms that emerge internally through bottom-up processes within IOs become more resilient.

We define resilience as the ability of a norm to retain its essential elements while being enacted over time.

We argue that how a norm enters an IO, whether from outside or inside, top-down or bottom-up, shapes the resilience of the emerging policy norm.

Beyond viewing international organizations (IOs) as diffusers of norms, we study them as social sites where international norms are transformed into ‘policy norms’.