Intergovernmental Relations Editing and Proofreading Services

Intergovernmental agreements are negotiated between parties who cannot compel each other and will not be in office when the agreement matures. That produces a characteristic document: warm on principles, precise on money, and vague on everything in between. The vagueness is usually deliberate — it is what allowed the agreement to be signed — but it is also why so many of these arrangements produce a communiqué, a transfer of funds, and no discernible change in what happens to the people the agreement was about.

We edit what intergovernmental units and secretariats produce — bilateral and multilateral agreements between governments, memoranda of understanding and letters of intent, schedules setting out funding, targets and reporting, communiqués and joint statements from ministerial meetings, first ministers' and premiers' meeting documentation, briefing material for intergovernmental negotiations, positions on jurisdiction and constitutional questions, dispute avoidance and resolution provisions, annual progress and accountability reports under agreements, secretariat governance documents and terms of reference, treaty and international agreement implementation material for subnational governments, and public explanations of what an agreement will and will not do. Our editors check that the accountability provisions are capable of being operated by whoever holds these files in five years.

The reporting and accountability schedule is where an intergovernmental agreement either does something or does not, and it is routinely the last thing drafted, at the end of a negotiation, by tired people. An agreement committing parties to "report annually on progress against shared objectives" has committed to nothing: there is no baseline, no defined indicator, no publication requirement and no consequence for silence. We work on these so each indicator is defined with its source and its measurement method, so a baseline is either stated or the schedule requires one within a fixed period, so the reporting date and the obligation to publish are separate and both explicit, and so the schedule says what happens when a party does not report — which is usually nothing, but naming that is itself informative to legislators and to the public. Where the parties genuinely could not agree on a target, we make the disagreement visible as an open item with a date rather than dissolving it into aspirational language.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including material under negotiation and drafts before ministerial consideration. We are editors rather than legal or policy advisers and offer no view on jurisdiction, constitutional questions or any negotiating position. What we can do is make the text precise, internally consistent and operable by successors.