RE: NGOs and climate change science and policy making

[Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith]

One more footnote for this thread, about whether, how, and why NGOs have any influence.    The following article (abstract provided below) will be provocative for those who haven’t seen it (even though it deals with the Ottawa Convention, rather than the UNFCCC).  I can provide a full pdf copy to anyone interested.    Inasmuch as previous comments tended to suggest that assessing the influence of NGOs was a matter of seeing “actors” at work in a “context” – thus essentially invoking some variant of interest group theory – Anderson implies that elite theory would be a better starting point.  He is also suggesting that, if NGOs are influential in international law making, it is at the expense of “genuinely democratic…local processes,” NOT in support of them.   Kenneth Anderson, The Ottawa Convention Banning Landmines: The Role of International Non-governmental Organizations and the Idea of International Civil Society, 11 European Journal of International Law 91-120 (2000). Abstract: Establishment of the Ottawa Convention Banning Landmines was regarded by many international law scholars, international activists, diplomats and international organization personnel as a defining, 'democratizing' change in the way international law is made. By bringing international NGOs - what is often called 'international civil society' - into the diplomatic and international law-making process, many believe that the Ottawa Convention represented both a democratization of, and a new source of legitimacy for, international law, in part because it was presumably made 'from below'. This article sharply questions whether the Ottawa Convention and the process leading up to it represents and real 'democratization' of international law, challenges the idea that there is even such a thing as 'international civil society', at least in the sense that it is democratic and comes 'from below', and disputes that there can be such a thing as 'democratic' processes at the global level. It suggests, by way of alternative, that the Ottawa Convention and the process leading up to it should be seen as a step in the development of global transnational elites at the expense of genuinely democratic, but hence local, processes. Geoffrey. ------------------------------------- Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith Emeritus Professor of Political Science University of California, Davis Associate Editor/Reviews Editor Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy