Non-state actors have become an integral element of global environmental governance. Governments opened up intergovernmental decision making because civil society provides legitimacy as well as information. Yet do all governments benefit from that information to the same extent? Do non-state actors lobby negotiators across the board, or do they approach specific delegations? In other words, who do non-state actors lobby, and why? Extant literature has paid scant attention to the behaviour of observer organisations within intergovernmental decision making. I seek to fill this gap by analysing patterns in non-state actor lobbying in environmental negotiations. Drawing on insights from the national lobbying literature, I contrast two pathways for deciding whom to lobby: power and responsiveness. According to a power logic, non-state actors have an interest in establishing contacts with large and influential delegations. In contrast, the responsiveness hypothesis would expect non-state actors to seek out delegations that most likely react to non-state input, be it because of similar preferences or a high need for external support. I test these two explanations based on a novel quantitative survey of observer organisations accredited with the Secretariat for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Preliminary results support the responsiveness hypothesis: observer groups seem to approach those delegations that they expect to pay attention to their input, rather than delegations that have a disproportionate influence on the negotiation outcome.
