Global governance and inter-organizational relationships in the nuclear safety sector

Abstract

In response to global challenges the interconnectedness between different organizations is seen as the sine qua non, and one of the most important aspects of the organizational environment is cooperation and conflicts between organizations. This paper aims at contributing to an emerging ‘inter-organizational turn’ in world politics by studying the relationship between the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the paper suggests that inter-organizational cooperation and conflict are based on flows of information, trust, resource dependencies, and how responsibilities and roles are divided between organizations. Moreover, the paper indicates that organization type and organization size are important to understand patterns of cooperation and conflicts between organizations operating at the global level, and the paper also suggests that organizational birthmarks are important to understand why tensions are triggered.

A mixed funding pattern: China's exercise of power within the United Nations

“…Together with other global players, UN entities have been playing prominent roles in handling complex global governance issues (Kjøndal, 2021; Marx et al., 2021), and have attracted more attention from China. Moving beyond the ‘keeping a low profile’ mantra laid out by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s, China has adopted a more activist foreign policy under Xi Jinping since 2013, favoring the UN as the center of the international system to display a more globalist stance and commitment to multilateralism (FMPRC, 2022).…”