Role of NGOs in Promoting Salience of Stakeholders and Social Issues

Abstract

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) often pressure governments and companies to change solutions to social problems such as environmental degradation by shaping powerful resistance and forming coalitions. There are gaps in understanding how NGOs influence managers’ interpretation of the significance of social issues and social groups in stakeholder and issue salience assessments. This paper aims to explore NGO activism in the Russian Arctic region that emerged during oil pipeline construction and outcomes of resulting regional legislation on social impact assessment and compensation extended to indigenous peoples. It is based on the analysis of qualitative data collected in 2006-2019 using Salience and Institutional Analysis and Design framework, which allows to examine the role of NGOs in elevating salience of indigenous peoples as stakeholders and their concerns within the nexus of business- government-community operating at operational, collective-choice and constitutional levels. The new regulation appears to address NGO activism at the collective-choice level, but actually limits NGOs’ ability to influence radical change at the constitutional level of environmental governance. As a result, active participation of NGOs adds external legitimacy to government innovations, while paradoxically reifying the exclusion of indigenous groups from critical governance functions such as distribution of benefits and participation in modification of solutions.