Almost 50 international organisations, including the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), are involved in a partnership in support of improving the quality, relevance and impact of their rulemaking activities in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC) work on international regulatory cooperation.

The technical meeting of the Partnership of International Organisations for Effective International Rulemaking held at the OECD headquarters on 5 November 2019, focused on the activities for the next phase of the  partnership. Following the 6th Annual Meeting of International Organisations and the launch of the brochure The contribution of international organisations to a rule-based international system, the international organisations confirmed their continued interest on the partnership and expressed an extensive willingness to participate in the next phase, which will focus on the preparation of a Compendium of International Organisation Practices and the development of new International Organisation Studies.

The Compendium of International Organisation Practices will seek to produce a more systematic understanding of the instruments, practices, operations and governance modalities of international organisations. It will produce a detailed guidance on core features of international rule-making, will emphasise success stories and good practices and will produce targeted and practical toolkits to inform the design and the implementation of international instruments. The Compendium is due to be released in March 2021.

Since 2016, ten International Organisation Studies have been developed. The objective and scope of these studies are tailored to the needs of the international organisations in question and can vary between a broad overview of governance modalities and operational processes to a more detailed assessment of a particular aspect of international rulemaking.

A case study was developed specifically on the design of the OIE Observatory. The OECD study provides an in-depth diagnostic of the rulemaking and governance structure of the OIE and offers tailored recommendations on how the OIE can use its existing institutional framework and information collection mechanisms to set up the OIE Observatory.

For the next phase of the partnership, there is a strong interest of international organisations to address a new horizontal issue, which is the use of new digital technologies for international rulemaking.

The technical meeting was followed by an academic session during which international organisations and representatives from the Academic Friends of the International Organisations Partnership – an open advisory group – discussed recent academic work on international rulemaking and the next steps in their collaboration.

The OIE was represented in the meetings by Mr Rodney de Souza, Head of the Legal Affairs Unit, and Dr Karen Bucher, Project Manager, Standards Department.