The study of global environmental governance suggests that agenda-setting power is concentrated in a handful of high-profile, leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The recent rise of interest in pangolin conservation constitutes a deviant case in this theoretical tradition. In order to explain the puzzle, I introduce a new theory of small NGO influence and illustrate the mechanisms through the case study of pangolin conservation. Based on in-depth interviews with conservation NGOs, I show how small NGOs raised the salience of pangolin trafficking in global conservation governance by appealing to the shared values of the people who are highly interested in conservation. Moreover, the targeting of traditional Chinese medicine as the driver of pangolin extinction, while unintentionally, helped raise the salience of pangolin trafficking by leveraging the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Global North. Finally, small NGOs were able to use their expertise to guide leading NGOs and state officials in rule-making processes. The findings offer a corrective to the hierarchical view of civil society, calling for more careful evaluations of small NGOs in global conservation governance.
The benefits of computerized translations are their speed, accessibility, and cost. The risk is whether they are sufficiently precise for a given need. This note assesses the options available to translate legal text for socio-legal research. We evaluate three tools—DeepL, Google, Microsoft—and assess each one’s ability to translate similar legal content enacted by the Brazilian, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Mexican governments. We demonstrate that machine translators are reliable and effective, particularly at higher levels of generality. They are fallible, however, and each is prone to making critical errors that may jeopardize research. We show that employing human translators to edit automated translations produces high-quality translations in one-third the time and at a fraction of the cost. This methodological contribution promises to enrich socio-legal research by establishing a translation protocol that is affordable, rigorous yet simple, and transparent. We propose that scholars use this method for comparative socio-legal research.
Organizational ecology has attracted growing interest in global governance research in recent years. As a structural theory, however, organizational ecology has overlooked how organizations may shape the organizational environment by their own choices. Bridging the insights of organizational ecology and the study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I argue that the organizational choice of specialism (as opposed to generalism) increases the power of NGOs to influence an environmental condition—issue salience—by targeting a small but engaged segment of the public. Focusing on wildlife conservation governance, I collected new comprehensive data on NGOs and issue characteristics (2008–2015). My empirical analysis shows that specialist NGO density is strongly associated with issue salience. I further examined causal processes in the case of pangolin conservation advocacy, in which specialist NGOs first raised issue salience and generalist NGOs followed. The findings suggest a division of labor among NGOs and challenge a conventional view that the power of NGOs is concentrated in a small number of prominent organizations.
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