Non-State Actors in International Climate Change Negotiations: A Synthesis

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have, over the past decades, come to play a central role in international environmental negotiations. While this growing NGO participation has attracted considerable academic interest, scant attention has to date been paid to the strategic decisions of NGOs before and during actual negotiations: When do they decide to become active in international politics? How do they seek to influence decision making, what strategies and activities do they pursue? I see NGOs as rational, resource-constrained actors, and analyse their behaviour in international climate change negotiations in four independent papers, using data from interviews, documents, and a survey I conducted in 2011. In the four papers, summarised in this synthesis paper, I first compare the participation of indigenous peoples organisations (IPOs) in the climate change and biodiversity negotiations to understand when NGOs become active in international negotiations. I then turn to the behaviour of NGOs during the climate summits, and examine what advocacy strategies NGOs pursue, differentiating between an insider and an outsider strategy. Finally, I look more closely at one insider strategy—direct contacts with negotiators—and one outsider strategy—press conferences. With regard to the former, I ask which governments NGOs contact, and why. As regards press conferences, I focus on governments and analyse which type of governments communicate to the public through press briefings, and why. With these papers, the dissertation sheds light on the participation of non-governmental actors in multilateral climate negotiations, relating NGO behaviour to factors at the organisational and institutional levels.