In addition to the commitment of governments in financing these organizations, there exists the further burden of financing their participation, and the complex business of providing permanent or temporary missions, delegations to conferences, teams of specialists and experts to attend committees often of a highly technical nature, and of maintaining political control over all of this governmental supporting activity. In this process is involved the need to provide within the governmental machine, the machinery for briefing for all of these activities and the complex business of coordinating the activities of different departments of government. The providing of these services is an expense which, unlike direct contributions to budgets, cannot be scaled down and which thus weighs disproportionately upon the smaller governments.
However, more important for all governments than the financial burden is the difficulty of finding the necessary skilled and expert manpower (diplomatic, administrative or specialist) to perform such manifold tasks. In this respect, a majority of governments have already reached the limits of their capacity in an area where they themselves are in need of such people for their own internal purposes, and only the very largest are able to make the necessary provisions without difficulty.
2. At the highest policy level, the largely obsolete and overlapping bodies such as the G-7 group, the OECD, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council of Europe should be placed by a single body, possibly with the G-7 acting as a form of security council.
3. The charge so often levelled against intergovernmental organizations by governments and others, that they 'duplicate' one another's work is in fact only a negative way of approaching the problem of cooperation. If two secretariats are frank with one another, then information can be put before the relevant intergovernmental organs of the bodies concerned which, theoretically, should enable to governments constituting them to take decisions which would avoid 'duplication' of effort. All experience shows, however, that under present conditions governments are unlikely to act in this way.