Introduction to Yearbook Statistics
This specialized section in the Yearbook of International Organizations series, included for the first time in 2001, is in response to the many enquiries the editors receive for statistical information on international organizational activity.
It's also a response to the needs of many for new ways of thinking about the complexity of international organization networks – and the networks of problems with which they deal, and the networks of strategies advocated in that process.
The editors, the Union of International Associations (UIA), are faced with a major challenge: how to enable people to obtain greater insight into complex networks of relationships amongst international organizations, world problems, strategies in response to them, human development and human values. The challenge is to compensate for the natural tendency to rely on focused information on urgent issues by enabling people to work with contextual information and configurations of related issues and responses to them.
Since the 1970s the UIA has been exploring the visualization of international organization relationships and the possibility of some form of Atlas of International Relationships. Investigation of the latter was supported for a time by the publisher of this Yearbook and by UNESCO in the early 1990s but has only become feasible with recent software and hardware developments.
Clusters of types / statistics
In statistical tables in the Yearbook, totals are usually given for each category of Type 1. In addition to these totals, or sometimes instead of them, totals are given by cluster of Type 1 categories. There are 5 clusters and the Types allocated to each are as follows:
Cluster I (International organizations): Types A B C D F
Cluster II (Dependent organizations): Types E K R
Cluster III (Organizational substitutes): Types S T
Cluster IV (National organizations): Types G N
Cluster V (Dead, inactive and unconfirmed bodies): Types H J U