KEY MESSAGES

• There is a wide diversity of international organisations involved in global standard-setting, including inter-governmental, trans-governmental and private. They all have specific mandates, expertise and strengths, and are organised in very diverse ways. Beyond these differences, IOs share strong common features.
• IOs are actively involved in the upstream activities of the rule-making process, i.e. exchange of information, data collection and development of norms, standards and best practices. By contrast, they are much less involved in the downstream activities of the rule-making process, i.e. enforcement, dispute settlement and crisis management.
• To achieve their goals, IOs develop a broad range of instruments from legally binding treaties and decisions to softer tools such as guidance, recommendations, declarations and standards. IOs primarily rely on non-legally binding tools, in particular policy instruments, guidance and standards. There is no single and widely accepted definition for instruments adopted by IOs.
• IOs have a key role to ensure confidence in the quality of international norms and in their capacity to help countries achieve their public policy objectives by strengthening their culture of excellence in the development of their instruments.
• For example, the report provides striking evidence that international organisations have become more transparent and open to a variety of stakeholders.
• IOs face the critical challenge to maintain the relevance and impact of their instruments over time. Strengthening the use of evaluation tools in cooperation with members and domestic authorities who have access to information would help to provide the evidence needed to identify their continued timeliness.
• Co-ordination efforts across IOs are real and have increased notably in the last few years. This is an area where better understanding of the regulatory landscape and early and more systematic exchange of information among IOs early on in the rule-making process could help them build on their respective field of excellence, while recognising the specificity of each IO and the value in some cases of various views on similar issues.

FURTHER READING

• International Organisations: Their Role in International Regulatory Co-operation
• International Regulatory Co-operation - Better Rules of Globalisation – 
• Regulatory Policy and Governance 
• OECD Insights: How to make OECD standards a global success

CONTACT

For further information, please contact Céline Kauffmann, Regulatory Policy Division, OECD.