When do environmental NGOs work? A test of the conditional effectiveness of environmental advocacy

ABSTRACT

Under what conditions does environmental non-governmental (NGO) advocacy affect environmental outcomes? We build on earlier theoretical work and contend that the influence of environmental NGO advocacy is conditioned on (a) the ability of local citizens to participate in the advocacy and (b) the vulnerability of the state to external pressure. Without these conditions, environmental NGO advocacy alone will not improve environmental conditions. Using a global dataset of environmental NGO advocacy and focusing on reductions in CO2 emissions, we evaluate the implications of this argument in a global sample of countries from 1975–2010. We find much support for our argument among non-OECD countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• NGO influence
• transnational environmental activism
• domestic-international interactions
• environmental governance

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We define environmental NGOs as any formal, non-profit organization that is not controlled by a government and is interested mainly or predominately in environmental issues.

2. http://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/about/Success-Stories/.

3. See Barnes and van Laerhoven (2015) and Ians (2017) for other recent examples.

4. Although Pacheco-Vega (2015) separates out these dimensions, for our analysis, we combine lobbying strength and networking capabilities into one category: the strength of the NGO sector. This change helps facilitate our quantitative analysis that follows and is consistent with previous studies on NGOs, which typically focus on the overall number of NGOs in a country as a proxy for the multi-dimensional strength of the NGO sector within a country (see Murdie and Davis 2012, for example).

5. Within the area of environmental politics, the work of Betsill and Corell (2001) and Arts (1998) has been quite influential in setting up methodological frameworks from where to begin evaluating degree of NGO influence. Betsill and Corell (2001)’s framework focuses on goal-attainment (e.g. what kind of text did non-state actors seek to insert into the formal text of the negotiation) and used process tracing techniques to draw evidence to support these claims.

6. To limit errors and aid in replication, we take as many variables as possible from the Quality of Governance’s Standard Dataset (Version January 2018) (Teorell et al. 2016).

7. Results are largely robust to alternative timespans, including focusing only on the 21^st century and focusing on the longer time period from 1975 to 2010. All analyses include yearly fixed effects, which also help us account for any differences that are dependent on the time period. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting we limit our focus to a recent time period.

8. See, for example, https://www.wearewater.org/en/the-reduction-of-co2-emissions-a-main-global-objective_273571.

9. See, for example, work by this New Zealand NGO: http://www.greeneatz.com/foods-carbon-footprint.html.

10. Our online appendix shows results where our dependent variable is renewable energy consumption as percentage of total energy consumption. Results are largely consistent in sign and statistical significance. The appendix also includes results where we focus on percentage change in CO2 emissions and not level. Results are largely consistent in sign and statistical significance. Hsu et al. (2014)’s Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is not recommended for a time-series cross-sectional analysis.

11. In the online appendix, we provide results with two alterative measures of this concept. First, we create an organizational rights index from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset (Cingranelli et al. 2014). Second, we use the Freedom House civil liberties scores (Freedom House 2018). Results are consistent.

12. Results are similar without the lagged dependent variable.

13. The results for the non-OECD sample are significant at the 0.1% level.