International regime

International regimes are international processes and collection of rules, and sometimes, when formally organized, many of them can transform into intergovernmental organizations. They are, however, not actors or non-governmental organizations. Organizations only regulate and promote regimes.

Stephen D. Krasner defined International Regimes as “Implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations”in the journal International Organization in 1982. Regimes "are more specialized arrangements that pertain to well-defined activities, resources, or geographical areas and often involve only some subset of the members of international society", according to Oran R. Young, in his 1989 book International Cooperation : Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment.

Types of regimes include International Conventions such as the Basel Convention, the Mediterranean Action Plan and well-known regimes like the Bretton Woods System of monetary management. International Regimes might also include international organizations in a broader sense.

International regimes often form in response to a need to coordinate behavior among countries around an issue. In the absence of an overarching regime, for instance, telecommunications between countries would have to be governed by numerous bilateral agreements, which would become impossibly complex to administer worldwide. A regime such as ITU serves simultaneously as a forum, a multilateral treaty, and a governing body to standardize telecommunications across countries efficiently. The International Monetary Fund, Biological Weapons Convention, and are other examples of international regimes. The number of international regimes has increased dramatically since the Second World War, and today regimes cover almost all aspects of international relations that might require coordination among countries, from security issues (such as weapons non-proliferation or collective defense), to trade, finance, and investment, information and communication, human rights, the environment, and management of outer space—to name a few.

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