Multilevel Venue-Shopping in the Fields of Climate and Trade Policy: Explaining the Lobbying Strategies of Transnational Advocates

Transnational advocacy is almost by its nature multilevel venue-shopping. Lobbyists that seek to influence the policies of international organizations are confronted with a complex set of non-state stakeholders, nationals governments, intergovernmental agencies and organizations. The literature has developed interesting insights on multilevel venue-shopping, especially on how organized interests strategically maneuver in an environment where there is a large supply of policymaking venues. Based on a review of the main insights in the current literature, we develop testable hypothesis aiming to explain the extent to which different types of transnational advocates use multilevel venue-shopping. These hypothesis will be tested on the basis of a unique dataset consisting of approximately 400 interviews with transnational advocates originating in the field of trade and climate policy. The transnational advocates, who originate from over 60 countries, were interviewed at the ministerial meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The main advantage of our data is that it allows us to test for specific institutional factors (such as whether a lobbyist hails from a democracy, a federal state, a wealthy country, et cetera), organization features (such as resources and organization type) as well as the adopted policy positions (for instance, whether advocates who challenge the national government are more or less likely to develop a strategy characterized by extensive multilevel venue-shopping).