Collaborating across scales for climate action: how non-governmental organizations navigate complex systems

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can act as advocates of climate action. This holds particularly true in countries where governments have demonstrated little will or capability to adopt ambitious climate policy. There, NGOs make use of the various opportunities offered to them by climate governance systems that can be understood as polycentric and/or complex. To do so, existing research shows that NGOs form networks with non-governmental but also governmental organizations located at different scales (subnational, national, and transnational). However, what we know less about is i) how NGOs perceive the system in which they operate (polycentric vs. complex), ii) how they identify intervention points in such systems, iii) which expectations they hold concerning the outcomes of their actions, and iv) how they respond to the (perceived) characteristics of the systems, regarding learning or adaptation. This study addresses these gaps by offering a systematic empirical investigation of the collaborative networks of about 100 NGOs located in 20 Latin American states. This group of countries is instructive, since NGOs there seek to redress inadequate governmental climate action. In addition to the quantitative data on the NGOs’ collaborative networks, we provide insights from semi-structured interviews carried out with 10 NGOs based in Mexico (a country with a high number of NGOs) and another 10 in Chile (a country with a low number of NGOs) to assess their experiences of climate governance. The findings of the study contribute to the literatures on complex and polycentric climate governance as well as to the literature on policy advocacy.