Introduction

The concept of intergovernmental organisation (IO) refers to anentity created by treaty, involving two or more nations to work onissues of common interest (Harvard Law School, 2021). Founded in1945 to guarantee peace and security at an international level, theUnited Nations is the largest IO in the world. Other large IOsinclude the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and theEuropean Union (EU). In this chapter, we mostly look at IOs’capacity to influence policy-making at national level through avariety of mechanisms.

IOs have been seen as promoters of norms, standards, and policies.Beyond the view that IOs are only about the (effective orineffective) coordination of policies between states, or instrumentsin the hands of influential powers pursuing their nationalinterests, constructivists and other authors from other sociologicalstrands have looked at them as embodiments of particular policypreferences and as teachers – that is,as actors who foster the adoption of those same preferences by otheractors.

Decision-makers ‘do not think about what states are supposed to bedoing in a vacuum; they think about it in a world of other peoplethinking about what their states are supposed to be doing’. To besure, there is a local component in such understandings of whichpolicies are right, wrong, or misleading, but many of them ‘areshared cross-nationally’ (Finnemore, 1996: 35). A good deal of theprocess by which such transnational views are constructed takesplace within the framework of IOs. They are often seen asdisinterested, expert, rational bureaucracies that stand above thefray of national interests and for that reason are ‘grantedsubstantial authority and prominence’ (Meyer, 2009: 127). Inaddition, they are also ‘focal points for international community …places where people from many states gather to rethink … theappropriate responsibilities of political organizations, usuallystates’ (Finnemore, 1996: 35).

This role of IOs as teachers is no stranger in the literature and hashelped account for the fact that ‘states with “enormous differences”in terms of resources, traditions and needs have developedstrikingly similar strategies and structures to deal with similarproblems’ (Meyer et al, 1997: 145). This chapter sees policyanalysis as one of the ways in which IOs achieve this.