Dr. Lisa Sundstrom and Dr. Laura Henry
In their new book, Bringing Global Governance Home: NGO Mediation in the BRICS States, Professor Lisa Sundstrom and Dr. Laura Henry (Bowdoin College) identify and explain non-governmental organizations’ participation in global governance. Using the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as case studies, the book combines insights from international relations and comparative politics to explain the dilemmas and strategies of NGO mediation in case studies on HIV/AIDS, climate change, sustainable forestry, and corporate social responsibility.
We spoke to Dr. Sundstrom and Dr. Henry about their new book.
Could you tell us about what research questions motivated you to write this book?
Lisa: Laura and I were struck by how the international relations literature on transnational advocacy networks and global governance tended to focus on international NGOs, largely headquartered in Western/ Northern countries, as well as NGOs active in global governance initiatives. For example, scholars ask what are NGOs doing at the UNFCCC annual climate negotiation conferences? How do NGOs navigate international organizations focused on deforestation, HIV/AIDS, and corporate social responsibility? These are important questions, but these discussions inevitably focused mostly on the advocacy efforts of more privileged Western-based NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace, that could afford to participate in international conferences. Yet for both of us, in our own research projects looking at civil society in Russia through our early careers, we could see that there were vast numbers of locally-rooted NGOs active in domestic politics, most of whom never attended any international meetings, yet who still saw value in drawing upon and engaging with the principles articulated by global governance organizations and in international conventions of various kinds. We saw how these groups in many cases appeared to be crucial to any hope of their governments or societies implementing the standards that global governance frameworks were trying to promote.
“It occurred to us that there is a huge gap in our understanding of how global governance works and what determines its success on the ground - whether international efforts actually lead to positive changes to address our shared problems.”
To really understand global governance, scholars need to adopt more of a comparative politics lens – focusing on how transnational advocacy affects domestic processes , which have a lot to do with traditional comparative politics questions of state-society relations, democracy and authoritarianism,the influence of different economic actors, and local sociocultural norms.
Your new book compares the domestic reception of global standards and practices in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and South Africa. Why’d you choose these states to analyze and how did each contribute to your research?
Laura: The “BRICS” states and their changing roles in the world have inspired a whole literature and set of conversations, both scholarly and popular. Scholars engage in endless debate about whether this grouping of countries makes sense as a cohesive set of states – do the BRICS coalesce as a group advocating for the same global policies? Are they similar because they are “emerging” economic and political powers in the world? Increasingly, they are seen as states that may want to challenge the existing global order.s. We wanted to know: if the BRICS governments are seen as being more assertive on the world stage, how are the civil society actors in these states evolving and reacting to global governance efforts? To what extent are domestic NGOs and activists engaging with global governance institutions, and how are they mediating between their governments and global principles in their home jurisdictions? Moreover, we saw this group of states as illuminating key differences that we care about in comparative politics. They provide us with a broad set of variations on important variables like wealth, economic structure, regime type (whether they are democratic or authoritarian), and how governments interact with independent civil society actors. These variations were incredibly useful for us to leverage in understanding the determinants of NGO effectiveness in mediating global governance principles and standards at home.
What did you learn about how NGOs active inside specific states respond to global efforts to address climate change, corporate social responsibility, HIV/AIDS, and sustainable forestry?
Laura: We found that NGOs have a tremendous opportunity to use their government’s global commitments to try to increase the effectiveness of their advocacy at home. For example, if the government promises to use recommendations on “best practices” from international organizations to help people with HIV or to develop more sustainable forestry, NGOs can monitor the relevant government agencies or economic actors at home to see if they are following through. Local NGOs also can use international grant funding and information exchanges to strengthen themselves vis-a-vis the government. However, whether or not NGOs are actually successful in extending transnational advocacy to the grassroots depends to a great degree on the nature of their domestic political context. Are they able to engage government officials? What is the relationship between politicians and economic elites? Do NGOs have public support? Can they translate international norms in a way that makes sense to audiences at home? We see that NGOs working on climate change in two authoritarian regimes – Russia and China – were able to take advantage of the Chinese government’s efforts to modernize the economy and make it more efficient, while they faced serious hurdles due to the dominance of the oil and gas industry in Russia. On HIV/AIDS, we find that while both the South African and Russian governments were initially skeptical about recommendations from international organizations, South African NGOs used demonstrations and the courts to change policy in their democratic context, with an established history of popular mobilization; while Russian NGOs have been severely repressed and lack popular support in part due to their work with stigmatized populations.
What research and methods did you use to conduct your analysis of how these states are responding to global governance?
Lisa: We are both scholars of Russian politics and civil society, so we conducted field interviews in Russia in 2014 with key civil society actors in the areas of HIV/AIDS, corporate social responsibility, and environmental issues of climate change and forest certification. Russia constituted our primary case in each of the case studies on issues areas in global governance. We also hired undergraduate and graduate students who were fluent in the languages of, and knowledgeable about (and typically born in) the other four BRICS countries to help us in our research. Those students assisted us in gathering enormous amounts of primary data and secondary literature about policy on these issue areas and civil society activity in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. We never would have been able to write the book without their help. In each chapter for each issue area, we paired the Russia case study with a case study of another BRICS state that made the most sense in terms of salience of the issue to the country’s society and politics and how the comparison gave us leverage over key explanatory variables like regime type, colonial history, or norms of state-society relations.
In addition, to develop our understanding of global variation in NGO participation by country of origin in global governance structures, a number of graduate research assistants helped us to gather worldwide data on NGO participation in global governance institutions across time. This was an enormous data collection project, and resulted in a database of NGO participation, classified by country of origin, year upon year, for 42 different global governance institutions. In addition to being included in the book, this data analysis was also published in a 2019 article in a special issue of the journal Interest Groups & Advocacy, co-authored with the two UBC PhD students who were most heavily involved in the data gathering and analysis: Carla Winston and Priya Bala-Miller, who are now PhDs in their own right with their own successful careers!
What impact would you like this book to have?
Laura: In the academic discipline of political science, we would like to see the book inspire more frequent cross-over between the traditional political science subfields of comparative politics and international relations. Often the domestic constraints on or opportunities for the promotion of international norms and policies are at least as important – if not more so – to the impact of global governance at the international level. What begins with bold proclamations at UN conferences and in the hallways in international organizations doesn’t become real change unless it is implemented on the ground in countries around the world. To understand how those connections work, we need to bring scholars together across past divides.
Lisa: We would also like it to expand scholars’ lenses of transnational NGO politics to think about the domestically-rooted NGO actors that are often excluded from analysis when researchers focus mainly on the “big players” at the international level: Greenpeace and Amnesty International, for instance. These famous names encompass only a sliver of the advocacy work out there. There are many other smaller players that IR scholars frequently ignore, but whose engagement with global governance initiatives is ultimately incredibly important to how effective those initiatives are and whether they achieve their goals.
