The Co-operative Programme on Decommissioning under the administration of the Radioactive Waste Management Committee of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has recently completed sixteen years of operation. The Programme, which is essentially an information exchange programme between decommissioning projects, came into being in 1985. It has grown from an initial 10 decommissioning projects from 7 countries to 39 projects from 14 countries today. From purely information exchange to start with, the Programme has, in later years, been functioning as a voice for the collective expression of views of the implementers of nuclear decommissioning. During the first sixteen years of the operation of the Co-operative Programme, nuclear decommissioning has grown from local specialist activities within projects to a competitive commercial industry.