SKA Consortia have been established in the United States, Europe, Australia and India. On August 10, 2000, at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Manchester England, a Memorandum of Understanding to Establish the International Square Kilometre Array Steering Committee (ISSC) was signed by representatives of eleven countries (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). 

The ISSC meets twice per year. Its goals are to: 

1. promote the SKA as an international project, 

2. to provide oversight and to act as a coordinating body to establish agreed goals and timelines for the project, 

3. to develop a joint international technical and scientific proposal for the SKA, including an implementation and cost plan, and 

4. to establish and oversee working groups as necessary. 

The OECD Megascience Forum Working Group on Radio Astronomy  

For historical reasons, radio astronomy has no international vehicle (such as an ESO or CERN) to promote co-ordination of activities among countries and to organize large multi-national facilities.  As an ad hoc forum, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has established a Working Group on Radio Astronomy in order to inventory plans for future large facilities around the world, and to consider whether specific actions by governments are necessary to make future large telescopes possible.  Astronomers and funding agency officials from fifteen countries have attended Working Group meetings, and have in their Final Report to governments identified the mm arrays and SKA as the main international mega-projects being discussed for development during the coming 10-20 years in most of the participating countries. 

The Working Group identified one area that requires high level government involvement even now if the planned large investments are to yield maximum scientific returns.  That is SKA will not only have 100x the sensitivity of current instruments to celestial sources but also to man-made interference.  And to survey in redshift will require access to large portions of the radio spectrum.  The Working Group concluded that these crucial needs are probably unachievable within the science system alone.  It therefore falls to governments at a high level to initiate steps to evolve the current regulatory regime such that by 2010 it will be possible, somewhere on Earth, to observe with the required sensitivity and bandwidths.  The OECD delegations have accepted this challenge, and are recommending to the tri-ennial summit meeting of OECD science ministers in June 1999 that a special task force be formed to formulate and carry out appropriate measures to ensure that the desired observations are possible when SKA gets built.  Initial thoughts are that this will require establishing one or more internationally recognized interference free zones in unpopulated areas of the world.