Holesch, Adam, 1977-Jordana, JacintMarx, AxelSchmitt, Lewin2025-06-032025-06-032025Holesch A, Jordana J, Marx A, Schmitt L. Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions. Global Public Policy and Governance. 2025 May 5. DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00110-22730-6291http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70599Data de publicació electrònica: 05-05-2025As International Organizations (IOs) have proliferated and expanded their mandates, they have become embedded in increasingly dense and interconnected regime complexes. These evolving governance structures pose new external challenges for IO secretariats, which must navigate relationships with both member states and other IOs within their sector. Yet, comparative evidence on how IO staff perceive these external influences remains scarce. This article addresses this gap in two steps. First, it introduces perceived autonomy as a new empirical variable, drawing on an original multi-IO survey. Second, it examines IO staff perceptions of interactions with other IOs. The results reveal that IO staff perceive moderate autonomy, with variations across four key global governance sectors—trade, finance, security, and climate change—as well as within them. Notably, IO staff do not view interactions with other IOs as particularly problematic, challenging common assumptions in the regime complexity literature about governance congestion. By reintroducing the perspective of IO staff into comparative global governance research, this article offers new insights into how governance complexity is experienced from within.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2International organisationsGlobal governanceAutonomyInteractionsSecretariatsRegime complexesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess