Post-2008 Social Movement Networks Around International Tax Justice in the UK and Australia

International tax justice issues like multinational corporate tax avoidance have gained salience over the past decade of financial instability and government austerity. Civil society involvement has ranged from trade unions and NGOs calling for parliamentary inquiries to civil disobedience by less established actors. This paper uses a network approach to explore those actors and the relationships between them at the level of individual organisational prominence, organisation-to-organisation relationships, and overall network structure. This paper uses an original hand-coded dataset from five national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2016. The dataset collates all instances of public political claims about international tax justice for a set of over 100 civil society organisations. Relational data is extracted whenever organisations publicly exchange support or resources, such as co-authoring an NGO report or jointly sponsoring a protest. Findings from the media content analysis are triangulated using in-depth interviews with 35 key organisations. The paper finds that the UK network is larger overall and has a larger number of highly active organisations, as opposed to the Australian network which is smaller and more densely concentrated around the Tax Justice Network itself. Apart from the Tax Justice Network the UK is driven primarily by aid and development NGOs while Australia is more dominated by trade unions. These findings demonstrate that although the policy issues of international tax justice are global in scale, the network structure of tax justice movements vary nationally in ways that reflect local resource distribution and opportunity structures.