Raul, Paul, Cristina, Leonard, Wil, Henrik and Gepeders:
Thanks for your messages. In wintry Wyoming, any feedback is welcome. But it seems that my comments have started an interesting thread that deserves further investigation.
In our book, Gary and I asked two general questions: “how do science and politics interact?” and “how does that interaction affect policy?” Thus, we made no assumption and did not rely on any belief that NGOs are important actors in the interaction of science and politics and therefore influence policy.
I agree with Raul and Cristina: as seen in the Mexican biosphere reserve case, in some issues NGOs can lead the process or be highly influential in policy. In the biosphere case the US was uninterested and Mexico was largely incapable. NGOs partly filled the gap. Cristina suggests that where there is a governance gap, NGOs can be effective. TENGOs, as she calls them, have been influential in implementing Brazilian environmental and community development laws (articles on this by Celina Souza and me are currently in review). From my recent research on sustainable development in Costa Rica, national NGOs and community groups are doing what the national government in principle intends but is unable to achieve (or often, for lack of funds, even attempt).
If you ask the question “how have NGOs influenced environmental policy?”, you have assumed influence just as if you believe that NGOs influence environmental policy. In the social sciences if you look for hard enough for something you can usually find it. If an idea that seems to have been first formally proposed by NGOs is eventually enshrined in the final agreement - as with the precautionary principle in the 1992 climate agreement - demonstrating causal connection demands more than presumption. Perhaps if we practice causal tracing from NGO ideas and contacts to wording in final agreements, we are assuming that which is to be demonstrated. At the very least, it raises questions about the meaning of “influence” and how to measure it. Methodologically, I suspect that multiple qualitative techniques in an expanded “process tracer’s toolkit,” as Paul suggests, will be necessary but I will leave that to the experts.
NGOs are involved in most international environmental negotiations. However, according to the contributors to our book, they were absent from the tripartite Southern Bluefin Tuna negotiations, the change in policy on acid rain in Ontario, and the failure of a global forests conventions, among others. Some scholars (including Wil) have found that NGOs are influential in supporting science, defining norms, or influencing debate in many international environmental agreements. In our book on science, politics, and international environmental policy, Gary and I left contributors to find the influential events and actors in their respective chapters. We neither chose the topics nor influenced the choice of events and actors described in each chapter but we did enforce the style of presentation and eliminated the author’s overt interpretation (yes, I know that perception is selective, etc.). It seems that if you look back from the conclusion or holistically observe the process, NGOs often become marginal players. I observed many early climate meetings. The NGOs were certainly there and were very active in interpreting the available science (rather than making it) and in offering a ‘green’ perspective on value issues. But it was difficult to see that they had more than a marginal influence, even in the early days when information (much less knowledge) was sparse.
In many international environmental issues (especially in climate change, because it is so important) there is a less a “gap” in governance - as Cristina suggests - than an excess of governance: every national government wants an active role in making and enforcing the rules. They crawl all over the issue until effective policy (and, usually, NGO demands) are crushed. It is for this reason, I suspect, that NGOs are less influential in issue that generate large international negotiations than in smaller, more local environmental issues. Perhaps there is a Law of Inverse Influence at work: “the influence of NGOs on environmental policy choices is inverse to the size and importance of the issue involved.” I suggest that in more localized issues, the policy usually emerges from below while in the big complex international issues it is dictated from above. In the former, NGOs can be very effective, in the latter they are marginalized. But there may be other distinguishing characteristics between those issues in which NGOs are effective and those in which they are not.
This all leads me to suggest that we are thinking about the influence of NGOs all wrong. Our disagreements appears to be based in an assumption that all issues and all NGOs are comparable. For me, the problem is how to treat the relative influence of actor and context (a variant on the agent-structure issue or internal or external views according to Hollis and Smith). Political processes are very complex and as such it is improbable that direct causal connections between one actor’s actions and subsequent events can ever be conclusive. How important is an NGOs discussion of the precautionary principle at a low-level UN climate meeting when policymakers in multiple states need to be convinced of its efficacy for it to appear in the convention? Policymakers had to be receptive. Were they receptive because NGOs were talking to them, because of the zeitgeist at the time, or because it was instrumentally rational at the time to adopt the principle? And so on.
If we agree that sometimes NGOs are influential and sometimes they are not and that their influence varies in quantity and by medium (e.g. between science and politics) between issues, we should set the puzzle differently. Both from scholarly and practical perspectives it would be more useful to answer the question: Under what conditions (in what contexts) can NGOs significantly influence environmental policy? Secondly, we could ask: When they are able to influence environmental policy, is it primarily through science or politics? This sounds like an interesting and useful research program that could advance knowledge and help NGOs with limited resources decide where to place their bets. Despite Princen and Finger (1994) and theories of global civil society and the like, I am not aware that the issue of NGO effectiveness has yet been addressed in quite this way.
Comments anyone?
Neil Harrison
SDI/UW
