Can the Nobel Peace Prize be awarded to multiple organizations in the same year?

1. How the rules make joint awards possible

The formal legal framework that governs the Peace Prize explicitly contemplates shared awards: according to reporting on the Nobel statutes, a prize may be divided equally between two recipients or shared among up to three if the committee finds their work merits a joint award, and the prize cannot be divided among more than three people ^[1]. That provision is the cornerstone that allows the Norwegian Nobel Committee to name multiple entities — whether individuals or organizations — in a single year, applying the same numerical ceiling and sharing mechanism regardless of recipient type ^[1].

2. Precedent: organisations as laureates and joint recipients

The Peace Prize has long been open to institutions, not only people; the committee has awarded organisations repeatedly, and organisations make up a substantive fraction of laureates — official lists show dozens of organisational laureates across the Prize’s history, including repeat winners such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Refugee Agency ^{[3] [2]}. The committee has also issued joint awards that mix institutions with individuals — for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Prize with Al Gore in a joint selection — showing that organisations can be co-recipients in the same year alongside other entities ^[4].

3. Recent practice and examples that clarify “multiple organisations”

Contemporary lists and reporting demonstrate that awarding organisations in consecutive years or together is not exceptional: there have been years when organizations alone have been selected, and years when an organization and an individual shared the award; the World Food Programme’s solo award in 2020 and the joint IPCC/Al Gore award in 2007 are concrete touchstones of how the committee employs the statute in practice ^[4]. Catalogue-style sources and the Nobel Foundation’s own listings show that organisations have been recipients repeatedly and that the Prize has been awarded more than one hundred times to both individuals and organisations across its history ^{[3] [5]}.

4. Caveats, controversies and the committee’s discretion

While the rules permit multi-recipient awards, the decision of whether to award one organisation, multiple organisations, or a mix of organisations and individuals rests entirely with the Norwegian Nobel Committee and its judgment of “work” that merits the Prize; that discretion has produced controversy and accusations of political motives from commentators at times, underscoring that legal permissibility and reputational politics are distinct considerations ^[6]. Public sources document such debates and the secrecy of the nomination and selection process, which means observers must rely on committee statements and the Prize’s historical record to infer motives and consistency ^{[1] [6]}.

5. Bottom line and limits of available reporting

In short, both the statutes and historical precedent confirm that the Nobel Peace Prize can — and has — been awarded to multiple organisations in the same year, either by sharing the award among co-recipients up to three, or by naming organisations alongside individuals under the committee’s joint-award rules ^{[1] [3] [4]}. Reporting and official lists document organisational laureates and joint awards, but public sources do not disclose the committee’s internal deliberations beyond official rationale, so explanations about why particular configurations (two organisations versus one organisation and one individual) were chosen remain rooted in committee statements and external commentary rather than a searchable paper trail ^{[1] [6]}.