Inter-organizational relations in transnational environmental and women’s activism: multilateralists, pragmatists, and rejectionists

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the ways activists cooperate with and challenge other global actors. Here, we argue that activist organizations’ aims and timing of founding influence their connections to the interstate arena. Drawing from a new dataset, we examine patterns of transnational organizing around women’s rights and environmentalism in 2013. We classify activist groups into three categories based on their inter-organizational connections: (1) multilateralists are linked to a wide array of international agencies; (2) pragmatists are more selective in their ties; and (3) rejectionists operate outside the formal inter-state arena. We find that more recently established women’s groups are more likely to be rejectionists, operating outside inter-state organizations, whereas many younger environmental groups maintained ties to treaties and monitoring bodies. We interpret these changes in this population in light of the shifting geopolitical, institutional, and social movement context.