International organizations climbing on a ladder of public participation – comparative study of the WB, ILO and OECD

The issue of public participation in international organizations (IOs) has not been quite in the forefront of the scholarly attention. This article therefore aims to contribute to this topic by focusing on a specific case of three IOs and the approach they have chosen for letting public partake in its activities. Specifically, the World Bank Group (WBG), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have been chosen because they belong to several IOs that incorporate public consultations in their decision-making processes, a procedure mainly designed to collect comments from public to some of the IOs’ policies and documents or even in the case of ILO it even grants non-governmental representatives (employers and workers) the right to vote in the governing bodies. Yet, as this paper shows, there are other means which can be used and thus different levels of how much the public could be involved. To examine this issue, it employs a comparative case study of instruments of public involvement used by the WBG, the ILO and the OECD and their development in the last 10 years (since 2012 until now). It gives a detailed account of the existing rules, official documents, provisions, charters and guidelines and the contours it gives for the public to be engaged in shaping their policies, including the access it gives to non-governmental actors. It also looks on the transparency measures and policies, the principles of access to information and its general availability, involving also the inquiry into usage of various communication channels. Based on this analysis a general framework, a new ladder of public participation in IOs in general (similar to one proposed by Arnstein on a local level) would be suggested with possible indicators offering distinction between the organizations in terms of assessing the level of public participation. That would also enable us to provide some explanations hereof on the variance between these three organizations, which could then be used on a larger scale. What exactly it entails for IOs to consult public and what instruments they use for this purpose? What distinctive degrees of its participation can be identified and what factors could explain the difference in between the individual organizations in this regard? That would serve as the main questions to be answered in this paper.