Answer: Yes, anyone may use CC licenses for material they own, including governments and IGOs, and these institutions frequently use CC licenses on their copyrightable material. The reasons for doing so vary, and often include a desire to maximize the impact and utility of works for educational and informational purposes, and to enhance transparency.
Creative Commons licenses have desirable features that make them the preferred choice over custom licenses. CC licenses are standard and interoperable, which means material published by different creators using the same type of CC license can be translated, modified, compiled, and remixed without legal barriers depending on the particular license applied. Creative Commons licenses are also machine-readable, allowing CC-licensed works to be easily discovered via search engines such as Google. These features maximize distribution, reuse, and impact of works published by governments and IGOs.
Though we encourage anyone to use version 4.0, which is internationally valid and may be used by individuals as well as organizations, there is an IGO ported version of 3.0 that IGOs may also use. Read more about how governments and IGOs use and leverage CC licenses and legal tools, considerations for using our licenses, and how they operate in the IGO context.