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.