Challenging Restrictive Governance: Transnational Environmental NGOs in China and Turkey

As climate change becomes one of the most pressing issues humanity is facing, the importance of transnational linkages has been increasing. While the current state of the art has produced many insights about NGOs, there is still much to discover when it comes to authoritarian regimes. There are a lot of discussions on what kind of factors facilitate the relationship between NGOs, yet we do not know what kind of elements and factors affect the possible interactions between them in contexts in which their operations are heavily monitored and regulated through a variety of authoritarian institutions. The literature on environmentalism and NGOs has been focusing on democratic regimes and how they interact with activists for many years. With the growing number of authoritarian regimes around the world and the environment becoming a pressuring issue on human life, environmental activism within authoritarian contexts has become a relevant issue. This research proposal suggests that focusing on transnational ENGOs and their relationship with various stakeholders in authoritarian regimes can contribute to a better understanding of how domestic institutional structures and regulations develop and change over the years in authoritarian regimes and create or destroy opportunity structures for transnational activism on an issue that stretches beyond the boundaries of one state. This project is a comparative case study of the strategies and tactics of tENGOs in China and Turkey. The empirical part of this study involves several steps that require making use of various kinds of data qualitatively. This research draws from the literature on social movement studies, international relations, and organizational studies which individually fall short of offering a comprehensive understanding of state-society relations within authoritarian contexts where the domestic administrative, regulatory, and power structures have a major influence on the political processes. The over-arching research question of this project is: how do the tENGOs-ENGOs continue operating under authoritarian regimes with strict regulations on NGOs?