Conflicts and Coalitions Within and Across the ENGO Community

Abstract

This article examines the diversity of opinions that exists within the ENGO community regarding their diagnoses of environmental problems and their preferred solutions to them. It provides a conceptual framework that consists of two components: values and governance approaches. Different values include ecological sustainability, distributive equity and economic efficiency. Governance approaches target states, international regimes, communities and markets as alternative loci for institutional solutions to environmental problems. The framework is used to illuminate salient patterns of conflict and coalitional behavior and to project future trends in global environmental politics. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Blurring the Boundaries of Environmentalism: The Role of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society as a Boundary Organization in Northern Conservation Planning

“…Many of the people on the working groups from DIAND and the Protected Areas Secretariat had also worked with CPAWS, while those working for CPAWS had previously worked for DIAND. The development of interactive relations and networks aligns with the arguments by Alcock () and Guston () that politics, policy, and science as neatly partitioned should be rethought in order to examine innovative processes whereby multiple viewpoints and interests are considered. The importance of alternative networks came up in many of the interviews; respondents were often adamant that the cooperative nature arising from blurred organizational boundaries was nearly as important as the final plans.…”

“…Alcock (), however, provides a more nuanced explanation of ENGO rationale for collaborative approaches. The emerging cleavages within ENGOs and the current momentum in approaches and objectives are based on necessarily interconnected issues of ecological sustainability, economic efficiency, and distributive equity.…”

Climate Change Politics through a Global Pledge-and-Review Regime: Positions among Negotiators and Stakeholders

“…Stevenson and Dryzek [31] proposed that bringing in people who represent particular discourses would help secure both effectiveness and legitimacy. However, as pointed out by Alcock [32], much of the literature on non-state actors in environmental and climate governance have focused on what influence they have over negotiations in order to contribute to a broader scholarly debate on how decisions are shaped and formed [33][34][35][36]. In addition, this research stream should be attentive for empirical studies of opinions, as they are likely to constitute a basis for non-state actors" activities and roles through which they may exert influence.…”

Business insiders and environmental outsiders? Advocacy strategies in international climate change negotiations

“…The former includes all activities that rely on the direct transmission of information to decision makers; the latter, in contrast, seeks to create pressure more indirectly by influencing public opinion and mobilising the public in a direction desired by the interest group (Kollman, 1998;Grant, 2001;Gulbrandsen and Andresen, 2004;Richards and Heard, 2005;Mahoney, 2008). Some authors refer to the distinction as one between direct and indirect advocacy (Binderkrantz, 2005(Binderkrantz, , 2008, between access and voice (Beyers, 2004), between engagement and confrontation or between the politics of partnership and the politics of blame (Alcock, 2008).…”