What’s different about the environment? Environmental INGOs in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

Existing scholarship has established that environmental NGOs influence political and ecological outcomes across a variety of settings. Yet this work tells us relatively little about how the networks, strategies, and organizations in the environmental NGO sector compare to other NGO sectors. This article argues that adopting a cross-sectoral perspective illuminates how theory and best practice developed for other INGO sectors can apply to the study of environmental INGOs, and vice versa. Drawing on quantitative data we find that a) on average, the ENGO sector is not more collaborative, better networked, more institutionalized, or more geographically imbalanced than other sectors; b) the ENGO sector is marked by a uniquely high level of concentration in terms of relational and economic resources. We call for more attention to the origins of these sectoral differences, and also draw out their implications for ENGO performance, suggesting that theories of ‘gatekeeping’ may be particularly relevant to the study of environmental groups.

KEYWORDS:

• NGOs
• networks
• social movements
• institutionalization
• North-South divide
• collaboration

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This example further highlights potential challenges related to classifying organizations’ sectors.

2. These data and associate codebook are publicly available at: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/33863.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1758755. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This research also benefited from generous support from Yale University and the University of Maryland.