Participating in Polycentric Climate Governance: The Partnership Choices of Latin American NGOs

Abstract

We build on research on polycentric climate governance and the strategic behavior of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to assess the factors that determine the partnership choices of climate NGOs. More precisely, we are interested in how these factors relate to the type of governance actors and the governance scale at which their partners operate. We concentrate on 195 NGOs based in twenty-one Latin American countries. Our hypotheses postulate that the perceived benefits are shaped by both country-level factors and NGO-specific factors. Our network analysis reveals that the NGOs have formed networks with different types of organizations, which are located at different scales of the polycentric governance system. The findings of our regression models show that these factors especially explain the governance scale at which the NGOs’ partners operate. The explanatory power of the models is lower for the types of actors with which the NGOs form partnerships, indicating the need for further theorizing.