Transnational Advocacy over Time: Business and NGO Mobilization at UN Climate Summits

Abstract

Currently two contrasting perspectives dominate the literature on interest group community development. The collective action perspective presumes that interest group communities tend to be dominated by groups with few obstacles for political mobilization. The neo-pluralist perspective instead stresses that many interest group communities have inherent balancing mechanisms, assuring that over time these communities become increasingly diverse. Both perspectives, however, have primarily been developed and used in domestic settings. I argue that these traditional perspectives also are highly useful in studying transnational interest group communities. I analyze the mobilization patterns of 6,655 interest groups active at UN climate summits between 1995 and 2011. While the results mostly confirm a neo-pluralist perspective, which entails more diverse mobilization patterns, business and highly specialized interests did have a clear, and possibly crucial, advantage in the early stages of development.