Natural Allies? External Governance and Environmental Civil Society Organizations in the EU’s Eastern Partnership

ABSTRACT

Civil society networks have received little attention when it comes to sectoral analysis of adaptation of EU rules beyond borders. This article offers a remedy by conceptualizing EU influence as an opportunity structure, a resource, and a discursive frame used by civil society organizations. Empirically, it describes how EU rules are used to support environmental reforms by civil society networks in Georgia and Ukraine. Civil society activism and mobilization can lead to high levels of policy approximation despite weak sectoral conditionality, entrenched domestic interests, and low public salience.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Dreiländertagung of the Swiss, Austrian, and German Political Science Associations at the ETH Zürich in 2019 and the UACES 46^th Annual Conference at Queen Mary University of London. I thank Vera Axyonova, Lusine Badalyan, Adam Fagan, Nathalie Ferré, and Paul Stubbs for helpful comments on earlier versions.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Funding through the European Unions’s Erasmus+ Programme for the Jean Monnet Network “Transnational Political Contention in Europe” (TraPoCo), project number: 620881-EPP-1-2020-1-IT-EPPJMONETWORK is thankfully acknowledged.