Categorising Regional International Organisations According to Their Financial Culture

How do the budgets and resources of international organisations work and what do their patterns reveal about the institutional and political dynamics? This paper proposes a comparative study focusing of regional organisations in the Global South with a view to bridge the field of regionalism with European Studies and IO research. The paper introduces a series of typologies that divise clusters of regional organisations in the Global South with recurrent financial characteristics. The subsequent aim is to explore the application to other international organisations and to revisit the typologies accordingly so as to devise a set of ideal types regarding the financial cultures of international organisations. Feeding into the reflections on typologies and ideal types are the absolute and relative budget size, the degree of external dependency, the presence of hegemony, the division of costs, the payment morale, the existence of overlapping membership, the degree of centralisation, the agency of the IO administration, the existence and application of sanctions, the policy areas and the involved domestic institutions.