ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the administrative dimension of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) beyond Europe. It investigates the applicable legal framework and certain elements of political practice in order to determine their structure, roles and institutional characteristics. Transnational parliamentary networks are a common institutional feature of global and regional governance The chapter discusses the findings and shortcomings of the existing literature and queries their applicability to transnational parliamentary administrations. The IPU is the world's first and most important international organisation of national parliaments. While the existing literature has predominantly focused on European and some non-European parliamentary administrations, those of IPIs have been almost entirely off the scholarly radars. Finally, even though administrative apparatuses of IPIs come in different shapes and sizes, they exhibit commonalities which merit their categorisation as transnational parliamentary administrations and which warrant further research into the more granular, empirical aspects of their operation.
