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THE GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH PROGRAM 155 



host of other issues and institutions extraneous to the scientific tasks at 

 hand. Moreover, governments are by their nature complex and 

 multicellular political-bureaucratic organisms; each of their component 

 agencies has its own political linkages, territorial imperatives, and sup- 

 porting constituencies. The specialized intergovernmental organiza- 

 tions deal with their national member countries primarily through the 

 specialized governmental agencies of these nations. Thus, the Food and 

 Agriculture Organization's communications channels run primarily 

 through the food and agriculture ministries of governments; the WMO 

 sees the world through the national meteorological services, and so on. 

 A scientific program implemented exclusively through an intergovern- 

 mental organization will therefore inevitably be molded by the interests 

 of the organization's constituent national bureaucracies. Moreover, the 

 members of these bureaucracies will usually play a disproportionate per- 

 sonal role in the program. For example, in WMO-organized activities, 

 scientists associated with the meteorological services are notably more 

 numerous than academics. 



The nongovernmental organizations are to a great extent mirror im- 

 ages of their intergovernmental colleagues. Typically, they have slender 

 resources and minuscule staffs— indeed little physical existence at all. 

 Their constituencies, however, cross both national and bureaucratic 

 lines. On any particular scientific problem, they can entrain quite di- 

 rectly the worldwide network of interested and expert individual scien- 

 tists who, in the end, must do the work. For example, the framework of 

 the composite observing system for the Global Weather Experiment was 

 largely designed by ISCU's Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). 



It is important to recognize that the WMO-ICSU agreement on GARP 

 that created the ]OC and the jPS essentially created a new international 

 organization with interesting, and perhaps unique, capabilities that 

 simultaneously combined the assets and minimized the liabilities of the 

 two types of organization. Responsible not directly to individual gov- 

 ernments, but to organizations representing global constituencies, the 

 JOG could define GARP's goals with considerable independence, 

 guided primarily by scientific imperatives. Through these scientific 

 plans, it could focus the resources of governments as could no private 

 club of scientists. However, the JOG could also call on individual scien- 

 tists to participate in its work without much regard for their national or 

 organizational affiliation. The JOG had a staff and resources that were 

 modest on the scale of intergovernmental organizations, but substan- 

 tially greater than those enjoyed by typical nongovernmental associa- 

 tions. Moreover, the JPS used the efficient infrastructure of the WMO 

 Secretariat, while avoiding many of its administrative constraints. This 



