Recent data protection laws in the EU institutionalize NGO engagement with regulators and enable new mechanisms for bottom-up policy implementation. We study thirteen European NGOs and map their contribution to policy implementation based on a novel typology for understanding their scope (national vs. transnational) and goals (direct vs. strategic) of actions. We ask how NGOs vary in their contribution to data privacy implementation in Europe? What are the implications of those variations for differentiated policy implementation and EU problem-solving capacity? Through analyses of NGOs’ news articles and GDPR complaints, we find that NGOs converge toward privileging a transnational strategic civic enforcement model, using pan-European privacy cases to alter policy implementation, over individual citizen advocacy and empowerment at the national level. Civic engagement has served to mitigate cross-border policy implementation disparities, while preserving considerable regulatory discretion nationally. Integrating NGOs into the analysis of differential policy implementation of data protection helps shed light on the evolving nature of civil liberties in Europe.
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