Inter-organizational relations in transnational environmental and women’s activism: multilateralists, pragmatists, and rejectionists

ABSTRACT

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the ways activists cooperate with and challenge other global actors. Here, we argue that activist organizations’ aims and timing of founding influence their connections to the interstate arena. Drawing from a new dataset, we examine patterns of transnational organizing around women’s rights and environmentalism in 2013. We classify activist groups into three categories based on their inter-organizational connections: (1) multilateralists are linked to a wide array of international agencies; (2) pragmatists are more selective in their ties; and (3) rejectionists operate outside the formal inter-state arena. We find that more recently established women’s groups are more likely to be rejectionists, operating outside inter-state organizations, whereas many younger environmental groups maintained ties to treaties and monitoring bodies. We interpret these changes in this population in light of the shifting geopolitical, institutional, and social movement context.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational activist networks
• IGOs
• INGOs
• Geopolitics
• organizational networks
• conflict & change

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers at Globalizations for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. We presented a previous version of this article at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montreal Canada, August 12–15, 2017.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See, e.g., Berkovitch (1999); Boyle et al. (2002); Ferree and Tripp (2006); Friedman (2003); Hughes et al. (2015); Moghadam (2000, 2005); Naples and Desai (2002); Paxton et al. (2006); Ricciutelli et al. (2004); Towns (2010); True and Mintrom (2001); Wilson et al. (2006).

2 See, e.g., Bond (2012); Clapp (1994); Conca (1995); Desai (2015); Finger (1994); Ford (2003); Goldman (2005); Goodman (2009); Khagram (2004); Hadden (2015); Rothman and Oliver (2002); Smith (2008); Willetts (1996).

3 Our use of the term ‘rejectionists’ draws from Ford (2003), who observed a trend of environmental NGOs, ‘taking a rejectionist stance against the totality of global capitalist hegemony.’ With Ford, we recognize the fluidity of the boundaries of our categories: ‘Rather than juxtaposing them as insiders versus outsiders, however, … they may be seen more broadly as located on a spectrum’ (2003, p. 132).

4 In addition to the proliferation of international forums, national governments and international agencies have also provided resources to support transnational citizen organizing. For instance, increasing amounts of government aid have flowed through nongovernmental organizations, and the UN and European Union provide financial and other resources to help mobilize civil society around relevant conferences and programmes (Edwards, 2008; Ferguson, 1990; Hammack & Heydemann, 2009; Lang, 2013).

5 Social movements are, by definition, fluid and responsive to their changing environments. As largely voluntary associations, the collective entities that make up social movements are often not formally structured or organized according to professionalized organizational criteria. Compared with organizations, networks are particularly fluid, as participants devote varying degrees of attention and energy and adapt their participation over time to suit their interests and capacities. Because they seek to challenge the status quo, many activists groups refuse to formally register their organizations with authorities. Thus, we point out that any effort to formally document and track social movement organizing will necessarily underreport such activity. This is likely to be especially true at the transnational scale. Nevertheless, we believe that our effort to document the formal traces of transnational organizing networks and compare them across time, issue, and place can inform our understandings of how changes in the global political realm impact social movements and the larger trajectories of global social change.

6 Deliberative bodies may, however, issue agreements that require commitments of resources from member governments. They cannot require changes in national policies.

7 For instance, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 created the Commission on Sustainable Development to help convene governments on a regular basis to discuss environmental concerns and to move forward the UNCED Agenda 21, which established treaty processes on climate change, biodiversity, and desertification. The 1993 Conference on Human Rights led to the establishment of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose mandate is to consolidate and better coordinate human rights practices and policies throughout the UN system.

8 It is also important to note that many groups may simply lack the resources or capacity to sustain ties to IGOs, regardless of their strategic motivations, and we are not able to distinguish such groups based on the data we have.

9 Because our data are cross-sectional, they do not account for the ways that organizations can evolve over time. Consider the example of La Via Campesina, which was founded in 1999 and advanced the concept of food sovereignty through a bottom-up process of transnational organizing outside of the inter-governmental arena, a classic example of a rejectionist TSMO. Indeed, until recently, La Via Campesina had no formal relations with the inter-governmental system, instead linking to human rights discussions at the United Nations through another TSMO that had consultative status, FoodFirst Information Network (Dunford, 2017). In 2012, however, after engaging with the FAO over responses to the 2008 financial and food crises, La Via Campesina formalized relations with the United Nations in order to help draft a declaration for peasants’ rights, then becoming a pragmatist TSMO.

10 Half of such groups were founded before 1990 and half afterwards. Examples include the Women and Development Unit, Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights, Women’s Environment and Development Organization, International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy, and the Gender and Water Alliance.

11 It is also important to note that a lack of reported relations does not mean that TSMOs are not working with IGOs whatsoever. We know, for instance, that many groups are part of larger networks where a central organization serves as a liaison, providing information from relevant IGOs and articulating the networks’ preferences in those official spaces. For instance, the European Environmental Bureau plays such a role for European environmental groups. However, we suggest that the lack of a direct tie between a group and an IGO is meaningful, and has consequences for inter-organizational relations that are worth exploring.

12 One potential limitation of Figure 1 is that each of the networks has a different number of TSMOs. Specifically, although the women’s networks have roughly the same number of TSMOs overall (104-109), the larger number of isolates in the younger cohort may be causing the greater degree of fragmentation. To account for this possibility, we drew a random subset of 52 older organizations with at least one tie to an IGO and recreated the figure (see Appendix Figure A1). The network on the left, the older cohort, now has the same number of TSMOs as the network on the right, which is repeated from Figure 1. The difference between the cohorts remains: the younger TSMO-IGO network appears more decentralized and fragmented than the older network.

13 See e.g. Carroll (2016); Desai (2015); Snipstal (2015); Sargent (2012); Bond (2012); Reitan and Gibson (2012); Nelson and Dorsey (2008).

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this research has been provided by the National Science Foundation (SES Award #1323130), the Global Studies Center, the World History Center, and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

Notes on contributors

Jackie Smith

Jackie Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research.

Melanie M. Hughes

Melanie M. Hughes is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Inequality Research Lab (GIRL) at the University of Pittsburgh.

Samantha Plummer

Samantha Plummer is Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Columbia Justice Lab of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University.

Brittany Duncan

Brittany Duncan is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.