Who Governs Access and Voice of Civil Society in Global Governance? Practice Theory, Reflexivity and Power in the Study of International Organisations’ “Opening Up”

ABSTRACT

In this concluding reflection, we value the special issue’s focus on how power asymmetries among civil society organisations (CSOs) affect their relations with international organisations (IOs) and micro-level dynamics of in – and exclusion. Yet we propose to pay further attention to the crisis of liberal institutions and the shrinking spaces provided to some CSOs . We also encourage revisiting the liberal assumption that CSOs seek to democratise IOs and the proposition that the majority of CSOs are keen to cooperate with IOs. The pressing question for us is not how CSOs push in- or exclusion in IOs but how dynamics of in- and exclusion are generated in the web of practices performed by diverse actors. In our perspective, the question is best addressed in reflexive research that is aware of power relations, the methodological difficulties of researching CSOs and often inaccessible IOs, and the dangers of silencing non-academic voices.

KEYWORDS:

• Practice theory
• international organisations
• civil society
• power
• reflexivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The concepts of democracy, order and authority interact when transformations of order and contestations of authority are deemed democratic in scholarly discourses because they were created by CSO agents and/or further equality, for example through the inclusion of previously marginalised CSOs in IOs.

2 When scholars use the term ‘democracy’, they, as does anybody else, inevitably describe and evaluate a social phenomenon, stabilise a particular understanding thereof, further marginalise other potential meanings and democratic contestation (W.B. Gallie 1955-56), and push their position within the academic field through the contribution to complex conceptual debates.

3 For example, the accreditation of a NGO at the United Nations can be framed as a practice in itself, a process involving multiple practices (ranging from filling out forms, speaking to UN officials and similar) or as an institution routinely remade through pre-defined procedures (Pouliot and Thérien 2018, 168).

4 For example, Algerian peasants deemed the cultivation of peasant tradition an act of resistance in one situation and one of adaptation to a drastically changed sociopolitical order in another.