Governance

ILSI is governed through a structure designed to keep three functions separate: strategic oversight, independent advice, and day-to-day management. Each has its own body, and none can act alone on decisions that affect members.

The three bodies

• The Board of Directors holds ultimate fiduciary and strategic oversight of ILSI, including approval of the annual report and major policy positions.
• The Advisory Council brings independent expertise in labour law, migration policy and development finance to test ILSI's direction without holding executive power.
• The executive leadership team runs ILSI's operations, corridors and member services day to day, reporting to the Board.

ILSI's formal constitution, registration and regulatory relationships are described in legal status. Together with our accountability commitments — public reporting, a code of conduct, anti-corruption controls, safeguarding policy, a complaints process and a whistleblower channel — this governance structure is what allows governments, employers and donors to work with ILSI with confidence.

Why the separation matters

Keeping oversight, advice and management in separate hands is a deliberate design choice, not a formality. A Board that also ran day-to-day operations could not hold executive leadership properly to account. An Advisory Council with executive power would blur the line between independent challenge and institutional self-interest. And an executive team without external oversight would have no structural check on decisions that affect members' safety and money. Each body's terms of reference, and how members are appointed and can be removed, are set out in ILSI's constitution — see legal status.

How governance connects to daily casework

This structure is not only relevant at the level of strategy. When a safeguarding concern is serious enough to reach the Board, or when a whistleblower report names a senior executive, it is this separation of powers that ensures the right body — not the one under scrutiny — handles it. See safeguarding and whistleblower channel for how that works in practice. It is also why, throughout this website, you will see governance and accountability treated as closely linked rather than as separate topics — one describes who decides, and the other describes how they are held to what they decide. A reader who wants the full picture of how ILSI is run should read both sections together rather than either in isolation.