Good Governnance is Sectoral, Not Geographic: Domestic Institutions, Professionalisation and Compliance

A series of recent studies have highlighted how legal mobilization by civil society actors have created new rights or strengthened existing rights, especially in Latin American countries emerging from periods of authoritarian rule. With the strengthening of domestic institutions, especially courts, but also executive agencies and independent transparency and accountability institutions, new opportunities to mobilize have been created, and new pressures imposed on often recalcitrant authorities. This paper seeks to fill 3 lacunae in these studies. First it focuses on the rule of law as the outcome variable, rather than individual rights. Extant studies have been less concerned with mobilization which seeks to promote or defend diffuse, general, public goods, such as rule of law. Second, it “goes international” by considering the important legal opportunities created by a new regional organization beginning in 1994. Third, it looks at the ways in which civil society groups have been strengthened by their legal mobilization and their involvement in claims-making fora. Most studies simply assume that the capacity of civil society groups remains constant throughout the period in which legal claims are made in various organizations. In this paper I show that regional organizations have helped build capacity among civil society actors who seek to hold regulators accountable. The empirical cases focus on the Mexican environmental and labor sectors, taking the creation of the NAFTA side agreements as a starting point from which to compare the development of civil society capacity. After accounting for sectoral differences in Mexican environmental and labor politics, the paper analyses differences in the NAFTA oversight and review mechanisms (created by the side agreements), and the manner in which their different structures provided highly variegated opportunities for civil society organizations, and created different opportunities to build capacity.