International Organization

International governmental organizations (IGOs) are legally constituted, permanent institutions created by three or more member states to achieve some common purpose. IGOs represent the formal, visible product of [Page 479]the process of multilateral diplomacy and international regime formation, which includes the negotiation of both informal and formal norms and rules to govern particular issue areas. Although precursors to formal international organizations can be traced to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the Concert of Europe, the most important developments in the growth of international organizations are associated with the 1919 and 1945 settlements. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), often abbreviated to NGOs, are created by private citizens in three or more states as nonprofit voluntary organizations that exist to further some international purpose. They are especially numerous and strong in the fields of human rights activism and humanitarian and environmental campaigning. IGOs include both regional and global membership organizations and may be created to perform generalized or specific tasks. Security organizations are created to control the use of force. The United Nations (UN) is mandated to perform this collective security role at the global level. Functional organizations, also known as specialized agencies in the UN Charter, exist to provide international public goods and services beyond the capacity of any one state to supply. These may be subdivided between economic, technical-scientific, and social-cultural purposes, such the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Health Organization (WHO), and UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Regional organizations may be created for purposes of sustained cooperation and integration between the members such as the European Union (EU); to meet more limited goals of regional solidarity such as the Organization of American States (OAS), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and Commonwealth; or for regional trade promotion such as North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The definitive Union of International Associations yearbook recognizes more than 2,500 IGOs in its most recent edition.

Some INGOs, such the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, have almost global membership and long-standing legal status in international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions on the care of prisoners of war. Other INGOs, typically created in the latter half of the twentieth century, have rapidly acquired influential status, such as Amnesty International, the World Wide Fund for Nature and Medicines Sans Frontiere, or Doctors Without Borders. UNESCO maintains strict criteria for the recognition of INGOs. These exclude profit-making corporations, transnational business corporations, secret societies, and organized crime syndicates. INGOs must also meet tests of transparency in policy making and their financial accounting. INGOs with UNESCO accreditation can lobby within the UN system on a regular institutionalized basis. The Union of International Associations (UIA), recognizes more than 25,000 INGOs as eligible for inclusion in its database.

To reconcile the principle of sovereign-equality of states with membership of international organizations, most IGOs operate voting systems based on the basis of one member, one vote. The UN General Assembly votes on this basis, as do the so-called specialized agencies such as the WHO. Variations do exist, as in the most well-known veto rights of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The multilateral development banks, such as the IMF and World Bank, distribute voting rights to members in accordance with deposits in the same way as corporations, which assign voting rights to stockholders. The EU mixes weighted voting, proportionate to population on some issues, with the need for unanimity for the most important issues such as defense cooperation. A particular variation on unanimity is consensus decision making, an established feature of so-called conference diplomacy or global summits such as the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), or Earth Summit of 1992. Consensus procedures are open-ended and extend over the time necessary to achieve agreement. The UNCED procedure, having agreed to a general Framework Agreement on Climate Change in 1992, needed a further five years to achieve agreement on specific targets in the Kyoto Protocol.

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