How Participatory is Global Governance of Trade and Environment? The Cases of WTO and UN Climate Summits

Abstract

Granting greater access to civil society actors in international institutional venues is widely perceived as one potentially effective solution to provide global governance with more expertise, accountability and, ultimately, legitimacy. While recent research shows that global governance has witnessed a systematic shift towards greater involvement of civil society actors, we know little about these transformations’ effects on the nature of political mobilization by non-state actors. On the basis of a dataset collecting information on the participation of 2000 societal groups at WTO Ministerial Conferences and 6500 societal groups at UN Climate Summits over the 1995–2012 period, we show that the nature of political mobilization in these global governance venues remains largely ‘domestic’, both with respect to the organizational character and the priorities of these groups.