Unrepresentative international nongovernmental organizations

Local, regional, national and international NGOs send representatives to UN sessions, but whom do they represent? To what extent does an NGO represent a particular community? Some NGOs do not claim to represent anyone but themselves, but most legitimize their efforts by stating they represent or defend the interests of civil society or specific groups.

(a) African, European, Asian and other such regional organizations by definition do not have representatives from other regions. The fact that there are more such bodies in Europe is a reality resulting from the relative degree of economic and social development of Europe. (b) There is a functional distinction. It is unrealistic to expect that the African and Latin American continents should be well represented in an international association for arctic agriculture, for example. (c) There is a distinction linked directly to the presence or absence of national counterparts in some countries due to the relative degree of economic and social development. It is not realistic to expect the Comoros to be represented in an international association for the computer-assisted study of ancient languages. (d) There is the non-representativity forced upon organizations by the problems of communication and transport between distant points on the surface of the planet. A national body cannot always allocate funds (possibly equal to or in excess of its own annual budget) to the transport costs implicit in sending representatives to the distant meetings of an international body. This problem arises whether the meeting is in a developing country or in Europe, and whether the national body is based on a developed economy or not. At a time when travel costs are increasing rapidly and subsidies are increasingly hard to obtain, it is therefore natural that the viability of regional bodies may in many cases be greater than that of multi-continent organizations.