Public Mobilisation vs. Institutional Influence Strategies: Comparing Trade and Environmental Advocacy Networks at the National and EU Levels in Germany

This project examines the organizational properties and public mobilization profiles of policy advocacy networks involving trade and environment issues operating at the EU and national levels in Germany and the UK. Networks were constructed for each issue area in each country using two different starting points for mapping the networks: civil society NGOs that are highly visible in national contexts and EU based NGO platform organizations that, while national in charter, are generally more technocratic and less visible. The websites of all organizations in each network were coded for a variety of public engagement opportunities. In addition, we assessed the degree to which organizations identified political targets for their actions at various levels (local, national, EU, international, business). The sum of organizational scores enable comparisons of the entire networks. Some organizations belong to both the mid level and the EU platform level networks, enabling us to move them in and out of the comparisons to calculate what they contributed to the different network influence strategies. The key findings suggest that the mid level networks rely on significantly greater public mobilization strategies to influence policy than the high level networks in the Brussels civic society platforms. EU level networks, by contrast, contribute relatively little to the public campaigns in member states and interact with member states NGOs only via a small number of mediating NGOs (contrasted with the densely interconnected mid level networks). These findings raise questions about the public legitimacy of the more institutionally oriented EU policy networks. Our maps also show that most of the interconnectedness and coordination of action present in the high level EU networks can be attributed to the organizations coming from the mid level public NGO sector. The interesting exception is the German environment networks at both the mid and high level, which rely on relatively little public mobilization and in which the mid level and high level networks largely resemble each other. We find that these NGO networks consist of highly professionalized NGOs with disproportionate government or foundation funding and high levels of network connections to national and EU government and transnational organizations. We trace this pattern to the effectiveness of Green Party politics incorporating the advocacy process into institutional governance at both national and EU levels.