The Argument

In a nutshell, this book makes three claims. These claims are based primarily on empirical work in Europe and the United States,⁴ yet the reader will see the occasional connection to research in the global South, as well as references to fields that are not in the immediate purview of nonprofit or NGO scholarship, such as public sphere and feminist theories. The intent is to create dialogue between different research clusters that share an interest in civil society and the public sphere. Of course, weaving the argument by combining threads of theory and empirical analysis runs the risk that it might satisfy neither theorists nor empiricists. I would counter with C. Wright Mills: “Good work in social science today is not, and usually cannot be, made up of one clear-cut empirical ‘research.’ It is, rather, composed of a good many studies which at key points anchor general statements about the shape and the trend of the subject” (Mills Reference Mills1959: 202).

The first general statement is that the public sphere is a key component of civil society; this claim anchors the book theoretically. The next chapter provides evidence that influential theories of civil society sideline its role as a sphere of public debate by focusing exclusively on how associations and social norms are generated. I argue that these theories miss out on the conditions that enable citizens to take their issues into the public arena. Moreover, they cannot explain seeming paradoxes such as the existence of strong associations in societies with weak public voice. Only by making a systematic distinction between organizational density, on the one hand, and public debate culture, on the other hand, can we understand why, for example, the strong web of associations in Japanese civil society has such little public voice and influence (Pekkanen Reference Pekkanen2006).

The second claim is, in essence, a “public advocacy” argument. It contends that even though both institutional and public advocacy are essential to a democratic culture, it is public NGO advocacy that generates citizen engagement and voice. Institutional advocacy, by contrast, tends to be confined to non-public or semi-public contexts, such as government commissions and expert consultations. With late modern societies offering more venues for institutional advocacy, NGOs might see stronger immediate returns if they lobby government officials, brief members of parliaments, or negotiate with business directly than if they try to organize and sustain public campaigns. Even if institutional advocacy does not produce policy success, there are other factors that incentivize institutional over public engagement, such as resource constraints and reputational gains. NGOs, I argue, face opportunity costs by engaging in outreach and public advocacy.

The third claim builds on a political institutionalist argument. I submit that states and governments play a critically important role in encouraging NGOs to practice public engagement and that therefore the key to a stronger civil society lies not in a stricter separation of state and civil society, but in transparent, interactive, and very public government–civil society relations. My analysis of NGOs operating in various contexts, from the local to the transnational, suggests that the potential for public voice is primarily shaped by state–society interaction. Participation in the public sphere thus rests on governance conditions. These conditions do not just form outward barriers inside which civil society acts independently; they permeate public space and set formal rules and informal tones of communication. They structure information flows and, ultimately, are key to civil society acting as a public sphere.

On a meso level, I put forth a set of three explanatory concepts that define the specific conditions in which NGOs operate in late modern civil societies. All three mark developments that shape NGOs’ willingness and capacity to engage in the public sphere: (1) the NGOization of civil society, (2) the institutionalization of advocacy, and (3) NGOs as proxy publics.

The first concept highlights the impact of a specific development in the organizational formation of late modern civil societies. NGOization refers to a process by which civic actors from social movements in particular, but also from smaller community groups, are drawn to incorporate and perform as NGOs. Forces that shape NGOization have economic as well as institutional roots. The pull to professionalize meets the need of states, business, and private donors to seek out reliable partners in civil society. Positive feedback mechanisms set in if civic groups or movements NGOize. The returns can be material: A legal status provides better access to funding as well as to consultation or decision-making processes. The returns can also be symbolic, as with increases in communication, insider knowledge, and trust. NGOization might normalize the relationships between civil society actors and governing institutions. However, it also might result in the exclusion of some groups and perspectives that represent less organized interests. In addition, it might lead to insider or client relations between selected NGOs and government (Lang Reference Lang, Scott, Kaplan and Keates1997; AlvarezReference Alvarez1999).

NGOization sets the stage for the second conceptual anchor of this study: the increasing institutionalization of advocacy. This concept elaborates on a specific connection between government and civil society, arguing that as NGOs become stronger institutional players and are welcomed into civic dialogues with local, national, or transnational political institutions, the incentives to strategically limit public advocacy increase. As they develop, many NGOs come to avoid using their potential to produce and sustain what Jürgen Habermas calls “a critical process of public communication” (Habermas Reference Habermas1989: 232). Contrary to a common perception that highly visible public communication of NGOs increases an organization's institutional clout, the more likely experience is for NGOs to encounter the opposite, namely that too much critical public voice tends to jeopardize institutional leverage. NGOs navigate a trade-off between institutional effectiveness and public voice, and the dominant mode used to resolve this trade-off is to employ the latter only in a very limited way. This might lead to NGOs becoming experts in institutional advocacy and lobbying at the expense of generating broader public debates.

The third conceptual hook addresses what I consider to be the fallout from NGOization and the institutionalization of advocacy: NGOs acting and being perceived as legitimate proxy publics. For governments and supranational institutions, NGOs constitute “their” civil society and public, just one phone call away. This study examines how the dynamics of increased returns fostered by NGOization and institutionalized advocacy feed proxy publics and in turn how networked governance can contribute to NGOs’ generating stronger public voice and public accountability.

Before elaborating on these arguments, I would like to present briefly what I am not arguing. This is to prevent readers from misinterpreting my points and to prevent myself from overstating them.

First, I am not arguing that NGOs do not contribute to the public sphere at all. Some NGOs are advocacy organizations that work almost exclusively through public action. Yet the majority of NGOs are much more selective in their public outreach and employ only the occasional strategic communication tool. They are highly strategic in calibrating communication means for specific ends. For the former, generating publics is part of the end in itself; for the latter, it is a tool whose opportunity costs can be high. This book engages with the pulls and constraints that influence NGO public advocacy.

Second, I am not arguing that NGOization is always and necessarily bad. The pejorative slant that the concept has received over the past decade (e.g., Funk Reference Funk2006), which connects the concept to a “sell-out” of movement goals, actually inhibits an analytical perspective that emphasizes configurations and trade-offs; for example, the trade-off between institutional influence and voice, or between professionally stable careers and the navigation of dissent.

Third, I am not arguing that engagement in public advocacy will look the same for an urban development NGO and for a globally involved NGO such as Oxfam. Yet I do make the case that all NGOs confront some version of the same pulls and constraints that are embedded in practicing public engagement and advocacy. Steve Charnovitz has identified four pressing issues in the context of internationally operating NGOs that, with some modification, can be applied across the scale, down to the level of urban NGOs: (1) To what degree do legal environments accommodate or inhibit NGO activity? (2) Are governance contexts “rendered more legitimate” if NGOs participate? (3) To whom, and through what kind of procedures, are NGOs being held accountable? (4) How, and to what degree, has NGO participation changed policy outcomes?⁵ Whereas policy outcomes are not at the center of this investigation, the first three questions are directly relevant to an assessment of NGOs’ public engagement profiles and can inform NGO research from the transnational to the local level.

Fourth, I am not arguing that NGOs are the only carriers of public voice. Generally, we consider the news media to be best positioned to articulate citizen concerns while also acting as an interface with political institutions (see, for example, Koopmans and StathamReference Koopmans and Statham2010: 5). Yet mass-media-centered accounts of the public sphere tend to focus on elite-driven discourses in established media “arenas” and, as a consequence, award only passive “gallery” status to the majority of citizens and their organizations. The mass media approach to the public sphere does not leave much room for considering the impact of organizational publics, particularly since NGO action is often not reported in the mass media. If publics are made up of citizens joining together to debate issues of common concern, then the organizational publics of NGOs constitute arenas in which such dialogue takes place (see also Bennett, Lang, and Segerberg 2013). These are arenas, moreover, in which citizens can join in and actively partake instead of watching only from the galleries. It also would be misleading to conceive of these organizational or issue publics as inward looking and therefore rather marginal contributors to the public sphere. In fact, the publics that NGOs are able to incubate might be more active and engaging than the mass-mediated publics of traditional media.

Last, I am not arguing that government is always the solution when NGOs avoid public outreach and engagement. Yet the opposite – freeing the state of all obligations toward civil society and, more specifically, toward making sure that NGOs can actually fulfill their function as organizational publics – is equally shortsighted. Government, so the argument of this book, can either limit or help expand the public voice of the nongovernmental sector. More specifically, it can provide incentives for NGOs to practice outreach, to build and engage publics. In effect, states and other governance bodies play a major role in whether NGOs act as catalysts of, or as proxies for, the public sphere.

Before we turn to the argument more systematically, a few definitions and clarifications of the terms used in this book are in order.

What Are Ngos?

There is no single widely shared definition of what constitutes an NGO. Much like the term “civil society,” the NGO has been one of the moving targets of social analysis in that it describes a phenomenon with unclear boundaries, a multitude of self-proclaimed or associated actors, and an equally hazy set of norms and tasks. Some hail NGOs as leading a “global associational revolution” (Salamon Reference Salamon1993), whereas others see them as an “unelected few” with the “potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies” (American Enterprise Institute2003a). They are perceived alternately as principal agents of a new “subpolitics” (Beck Reference Beck2007), “wild cards” in politics (DeMarsReference DeMars2005), or as publicly unaccountable interest groups of the third millennium (Economist2000).

The term “NGO” was first used in 1945 when the United Nations made a distinction in its charter between the participation of intergovernmental agencies and non-government associated groups. UN provisions cast a wide NGO net, basically registering every private body that was independent from government control, not seeking public office, not operating for profit, and not a criminal organization (Willetts Reference Willetts2002). For the UN, the U.S. Presbyterian Church is as much an NGO as the International Transport Workers Federation or the Indian Society for Agribusiness Professionals. It is important to point out that the UN did not discover a new species of civic actors, but in a constructivist manner categorized and labeled a broad set of previously active associations. Moreover, this constructivist labeling of the NGO sector was not restricted to truly internationally operating organizations, as some definitions since have suggested. It is a label that has been used to identify civic organizations across the spectrum, from transnational to national, regional, and local associations.

A number of alternative concepts have emerged since the 1950s. Some authors distinguish between grassroots activism (on the local and regional level) and the nongovernmental sector (on the national and international level). Others find the merely negative lineage of NGOs (as in the “nonstate” concept) wanting and attempt to replace it with the encompassing term “civil society organizations” (Salamon Reference Salamon1999; Berman Reference Berman, Edwards, Foley and Diani2001). In the United States, the debate is dominated by the term “nonprofit” as opposed to “nongovernmental,” which is reserved for the international sphere. Others assert that the terms can be used interchangeably (Steinberg and PowellReference Powell and Steinberg2006).⁶ Finally, much nonprofit research has been combined in recent years under the header of a “third sector,” indicating a specific societal place for NGOs that is different from, and lies between, the public and the private sector or in between state, market, and family (Zimmer Reference Zimmer, Appel, Dittrich, Lange, Sitermann, Stallmann and Kendall2005).

I opt to retain the label “nongovernmental” organization for two reasons – one related to functionality, the other to semantics. First, the term “NGO” speaks more sensitively to the conflicts that this book explores than the term “nonprofit” or “third sector.” The focus on the role of NGOs in contributing to the public sphere and on the give and take between government, institutional publics, and organizational voice is best represented by a term that reflects government–civil society relations. Second, the NGO label has global salience; it is used across Africa, Asia, and Latin America just as much as in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.⁷ Because this book attempts to theorize a particular trait of NGOs, I want it to travel well semantically.

Most definitions of the NGO sector enumerate certain shared characteristics on which we can build. On the most basic level, NGOs (1) are not related to government, (2) are not for profit, (3) are voluntary, and (4) pursue activities for the common good instead of just for their members. In broad terms, these activities can take the form of either providing services or advocating public policy (see the definition in the Encyclopedia Britannica⁸).

Based on this broad characterization, we can add more specific NGO traits that inform both the empirical part and the theoretical argument of this book.⁹ One, NGOs tend to operate at the intersection between traditional, mostly nation-state, and institutionally bound politics and newer forms of stronger identity-based, non-party-driven civic engagement. Even though, in legal terms, NGOs must limit their political engagement to what appears to be “nonpolitical” activities, they often engage in a form of politics “outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states” (Beck Reference Beck1996: 18). Therefore the nongovernmental sector is credited with playing a central part in establishing new geographies of political power at the intersection of civil society and institutional politics. By publicly staying on the sidelines of institutional political processes, NGOs might fuel a perception that Volker Heins describes as “a certain aloofness from politics” (Heins Reference Heins2008: 17). Yet this public aloofness might be more strategically motivated than a de facto unwillingness to engage in institutional advocacy. Second, NGOs have a moral purpose that fuels their orientation toward problems and people outside of their organization and thus distinguishes the sector's rationale from that of business and from a reality lens that focuses on profit or other self-serving individualist motives. Third, NGOs can be nonterritorial in the sense that they are ultimately not bound by nation-states, seek out different engagements on multiple levels of society, and might act simultaneously locally and transnationally (Heins Reference Heins2008: 19). Finally, NGOs often act as public experts, distinguishing their activities from those of private corporations. NGOs are focused on lending their expertise to a greater public good.

In sum, this book treats an NGO as a voluntary not-for-profit organization that is bound legally to be nonpolitical but can engage in non-institutional politics, that generates normative claims about a common good, and that acts on these claims as a public expert in variously scaled civic spaces. Again, this is not a normative statement, but an attempt to capture the empirical NGO reality of the early 21st century.

The Ngo Boom

Although there is no accurate assessment of how many NGOs operate from the local to the transnational level, the sector has expanded substantially in recent years. Between 1982 and 2006, the number of nonprofits in the United States almost doubled from 793,000 to 1,478,000 (Urban Institute 2006). In Germany, in the five years after unification – from 1990 to 1995 – the number of registered associations jumped from 286,000 to about 450,000 (Anheier and Seibel Reference Anheier and Seibel2001: 74). National surveys have counted more than one million NGOs in India (Sooryamoorthy and Gangrade Reference Sooryamoorthy and Gangrade2001), 359,000 registered NGOs in Russia (Skvortsova Reference Skvortsova2007), 55,000 in Poland (Garsztecki Reference Garsztecki2006), 570,000 in Germany in 2008 (DGVM 2007; Vereinsstatistik 2008), and 161,000 in Canada (Statistics Canada 2005).¹⁰ NGOs are a thriving part of Western market economies, making up 14.4 percent of the workforce in the Netherlands, 11.1 percent in Canada, 9.8 percent in the United States, 6.3 percent in Australia, and 5.9 percent in Germany (Johns Hopkins Comparative Non-Profit Project 2000), although a more recent survey puts employment in the German nonprofit sector as high as 9 percent (Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft et al. 2011: 6).

The NGO boom in the international arena is also well documented. Between 1994 and 2009, the number of NGOs registered with the UN Economic and Social Council increased from 41 to 3,172 (UN ECOSOC 2009). Since the start of the new millennium, there has been more than a threefold increase in the number of accredited NGOs registered with ECOSOC. The Global Civil Society Yearbook 2004/5 counts 17,952 headquarters of internationally operating NGOs (Anheier, Glasius, and KaldorReference Anheier2004). The Yearbook of International Organizations for 2005/6 cites 51,509 internationally operating NGOs (Union of International Organizations 2006).¹¹

What has caused this explosion in organized civil society activity worldwide? There is no single answer to this question: The growth of NGOs has been influenced by political and social contexts, fields of engagement, and scale. For example, assessments of the factors that drive the NGO boom emphasize different conditions for India (economic liberalization and decentralization; ChandhokeReference Chandhoke2003), France (the expansive state; Levy Reference Levy1999; RosanvallonReference Rosanvallon2007), and Russia (political liberalization and international donors; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; AksartovaReference Aksartova, Hammack and Heydemann2009). The narratives of growth for environmental NGOs differ from those for NGOs promoting the arts. They also vary depending on whether the focus is on local, national, international, or transnational arenas. Because the field of NGO studies reflects this “multifaceted view of NGOs” (Betsill and Corell Reference Betsill and Corell2008: 7), it is faced with the challenge of how to aggregate empirically grounded findings into theoretical propositions that travel across geography, discipline, and scale.¹² Moreover, various subdisciplines in the social sciences point to different roots of increases in civic activism, most obvious in the varied answers that theories of social movements, governance, globalization, and communication have to offer. Early accounts of the local and national civic organizing boom in Western societies since the 1960s focused primarily on postmaterialist values of economically affluent generations (Inglehart Reference Inglehart1977). Since then, social and cultural bottom-up explanations that interpret the rise of NGOs as a result of increased levels of education and prosperity have taken a back seat to social movement analyses and their focus on the rise of political opportunity structures as the main predictor for activism (TarrowReference Tarrow1998; McAdam and Scott Reference McAdam, Scott, Davis, McAdam, Scott and Zald2005). These more recent studies have identified organizational dynamics, such as the professionalization of social movements and their focus on identity politics (e.g., Staggenborg Reference Staggenborg1988; EdwardsReference Edwards2004; RothReference Roth, Brunnengräber, Klein and Walk2005), as contributing to the expansion of the nongovernmental sector. In more institution-focused research, specific organizing opportunities generated by liberal states (Walker Reference Walker1991; BerryReference Berry, Skocpol and Fiorina1999) or neoliberal politics (e.g., Fine and RaiReference Fine and Rai1997; Grant Reference Grant2000) have gained traction to explain the increase. In the global North, devolution and Thatcher-Reagan–inspired externalization of state functions to civic sector organizations in particular provided incentives to form NGOs (Peterson Reference Peterson and Petracca1992). Tony Blair's “Third Way” in Great Britain and Gerhard Schroeder's reformed Social Democracy in Germany formulated political programs that encouraged the subsidiary activation of civic organizing not just as volunteer work but also as a new professionalized civic commons. Kim Reimann shows how the political opportunities for the sector have multiplied through extensive state and foundation funding and that, in fact, “it is impossible to understand the explosive growth of NGOs in the past several decades without taking into account the ways in which states, international organizations, and other structures have actively stimulated and promoted NGOs from above” (Reimann Reference Reimann2006: 46). These changes took hold at all levels of government; however, local and transnational political institutions in particular have, while externalizing state or organization functions and program tasks, provided space for nongovernmental organizations to meet and provide input under the umbrella of formal governance bodies (AlvarezReference Alvarez1999; Reimann Reference Reimann2006; Steffek and Hahn Reference Steffek2010).

Finally, engagement and communication patterns among baby boomers have changed in ways that favor NGOs over political parties and traditional interest groups while exposing more fluid, single-issue, and networked mobilization patterns (Lipschutz 1996; BennettReference Bennett1998, Reference Bennett, Donk, Loader, Nihon and Rucht2004; BimberReference Bimber2003; Flanagin and Stohl 2009). The majority of post-1960s NGOs seem to be better positioned to feed off, and in turn charge, these different social engagement patterns than traditional interest groups (Skocpol Reference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999a). Yet, although the sector grows in size and seems to gain legitimacy as a major influence on political decision-making processes, governments or governance institutions do not always or unequivocally like the guests that they have invited to the table.

Ngo Tropes

The stories that make the headlines tend to zoom in on the adversarial role of NGOs vis-à-vis governments. Here are some snapshots of how contentious NGO–government relations appear to be across the globe:

In Australia, the Howard government instituted a “gag clause” that prevented NGOs that received government funding from discussing their programs without prior government approval (Edgar Reference Edgar2008). In 2008, the successor government reinstituted freedom of speech for the NGO sector.

In Ethiopia, the Civil Society Organization Law of 2009 prohibited any domestic NGO that received more than 10 percent of its funding from abroad from engaging in activities related to “the advancement of human and democratic rights…the promotion of the equality of nations, nationalities and peoples and that of gender and religion…the promotion of the rights of the disabled and children's rights” (Articles 2 and 14(5); International Center for Not-For-Profit Law 2009: 2).

In Russia, under President Putin, a new NGO law took effect in 2006 that set strict terms for registration and for the acceptance of funds from foreign donors. An NGO may be denied registration, for example, if its activities are deemed to be a threat to Russia's “sovereignty,” its “unique character, or cultural heritage” or if it offends the “national or religious feelings of citizens” (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006: 253ff).

In the European Parliament, the European Commission faced criticism for funding NGOs that are critical of neoliberal politics, such as Attac. That NGO had received the comparatively minuscule amount of about 60,000 Euros from Brussels between 2001 and 2003 (Klas Reference Klas2005). Economically liberal Parliament members asked the Commission to withdraw funding from Attac.

In the United States, Greenpeace struck a deal with the U.S. government after 14 of its members faced felony conspiracy charges for disrupting a test of the antimissile defense system. Prosecutors acquired a legal promise from the NGO not to hold protests at or trespass on military property for the next five years, and Greenpeace agreed to pay $150,000 in fines to the government (Agence France-Press 2002; “National Briefing” 2002).

Many of today's big news stories signal conflict rather than partnership between NGOs and governments. Not only authoritarian states and managed democracies but also liberal political systems seem to be challenged by the increasing power of NGOs. In an attempt to portray and understand this uneasy relationship, news reports often rely on two tropes that have become iconic from the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe to the resistance movements in Latin America and the Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa: (1) the struggle of David against Goliath and (2) the image of NGO-based counterpublics.

The media invoke the “David and Goliath” trope by portraying NGOs as often resource poor and marginalized, but vocal public defenders of human rights, democratic ideals, and economic and political equality. Governments, by contrast, are sketched as – at best – powerful regulators and – at worst – as relentless opponents of the nongovernmental sector. This narrative pits political power giants against the aspirations of marginal groups – well-armored state actors against inventive challengers with fewer resources and only a few stones in a sling. However, the relationship between NGOs and governments is more complicated than the David and Goliath narrative suggests.

What if David and Goliath simply live a marriage of convenience? What if they are actually involved in a somewhat symbiotic relationship? By all accounts, the conflict-ridden news stories of government–NGO relations that dominate the press are not the norm, but the exception: More narratives fit the relationship pattern of co-dependency among unequals. When NGOs sit at institutional tables, there is a reciprocal bestowing of legitimacy. In addition to depending on segments of the NGO sector to provide services and perform consultative roles, governments increasingly rely on NGOs for channeling citizen voice and ultimately for legitimizing state action. NGOs give organizational structure to a fragmented, individualized citizenry that seems tired of “politics as usual” and shows stronger affinity for NGO causes than for ideological party alignments. Many NGOs thus are willing interlocutors of government, however vaguely “representing” civil society. NGOs, in turn, are rewarded for establishing and preserving positive ties with government. The rewards tend to come in legal, economic, and political currency. NGOs depend on states for legal protection and often also for funding, as well as for access to institutional advocacy forums and influence-generating contexts. The ties that bind NGOs and governments thus call for closer inspection.

Whereas the David and Goliath trope has recently begun to receive some critical attention (Warleigh Reference Warleigh2001; Berry and AronsReference Berry and Arons2003; DeMarsReference DeMars2005; Heins Reference Heins2008; among others), a second and related trope has been less explored: It is the narrative that constructs NGOs as the center of vibrant counterpublics. The “counterpublic” trope portrays NGOs as active catalysts of civil society and as committed public actors, organizing their supporters and using media-savvy repertoires for the purpose of communicating concerns of marginalized constituencies. We all have images of such counterpublics in our minds: We might think of Greenpeace activists in their small lifeboats circling around Japanese whaling trawlers, trying to obstruct their activities. We might recall MomsRising.org covering the lawn in front of the Washington Capitol with two miles of clothesline full of “onesies” advocating for paid sick days. We might remember the worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003, when a broad coalition of organizations mobilized 36 million people to attend antiwar rallies.

This counterpublic trope is prominent in policy circles that perceive NGOs as representatives of concerned citizens and as alternative voices to mass-mediated opinion formation. It is cultivated by NGO staff and advocates who claim that giving public voice to institutionally underrepresented causes legitimizes their organizations. And it is reinforced by scholarly work that credits civic engagement with stimulating the public and political voice of underrepresented constituencies (e.g., Asen and Brouwer Reference Asen and Brouwer2001). NGOs have become shorthand for vibrant civic voice. Again, the analysis in this book complicates this trope. If the number of NGOs is rising globally and if individuals’ options to become involved and exercise citizenship have multiplied with the help of a diverse nongovernmental sector, why do so many citizens feel detached from public life and politics? Do NGOs do a good job in aggregating citizen voice and producing alternatives to dominant publics?

Closer empirical inspection reveals that NGOs are not sui generis boosters of public voice. Some do not practice advocacy at all and are committed exclusively to providing services. These NGOs play only a marginal role in this book. Yet even NGOs with an explicit advocacy mission might lack the commitment to mobilize their constituents and practice outreach. My argument is that advocacy organizations in today's world of NGOs are prone to prioritizing institutional over public venues in order to influence their environment. As one of my interviewees succinctly put it, “We don't need a public to be effective” (EWL 2007a; see Appendix 2). Are NGOs then just another reiteration of special interests, the embodiment of a new class of lobbyists of the 21st century? Is the sector in danger of producing organized advocates without incubating and engaging wider publics? What does it take to actually strengthen public voice?

Theorizing Voice and Advocacy

“Voice” is probably one of the most common and least theorized concepts in the social sciences.¹³ It is generally associated with Albert Hirschman's(Reference Hirschman1970) analysis of political and economic responses to the decline of organizations or political systems. Confronted with the alternatives of “exit” or “voice,” people make conscious choices by exercising either their voice option or by deciding to leave. Voice in Hirschman's theory is “any attempt at all to change, rather than escape from, an objectionable state of affairs” (Hirschman Reference Hirschman1970: 30). Being vocal means “speaking up” versus “letting go” and, in political terms, choosing active intervention and public communication over silent dissociation from political conflicts.

Representative democracies, in theory, offer numerous opportunities for citizens to speak up and intervene in political affairs; we can for example vote, write petitions, contact our representatives, and attend public meetings. Yet engaging in these activities is often like participating in a silent auction: The event itself is public, but communication and voice are minimized. Most formal ways of participation in political affairs are individualized, almost private, acts. Theories of deliberative and participatory democracy challenge this anorexic vision of political citizenship and propose alternative ways to generate citizen voice. It is in this context that James Fishkin (Reference Fishkin1997) spreads the idea of deliberative polling and that John Gastil (Reference Gastil2008) explores citizen voice as processes of public deliberation. Participatory theorists, in their critique of representative and, to some degree, deliberative solutions to citizen voice, emphasize that social marginalization is often reproduced even in engineered deliberations and that underrepresented constituencies might need alternative venues and forms to speak up. They focus on the substantive inclusion of different groups, rather than on procedural acts of molding their different voices into one (i.e., Young Reference Young2001). Deliberative and participatory theories have concluded that settings for activating public voice are not naturally engrained in representative democracies, but instead have to be engineered in ways that go beyond liberal democracy's “default” settings. The concept of voice suggests speaking and taking positions in public. It suggests communication, interaction, and debate, whereas participation might not necessarily have such an overtly communicative and public face. Therefore, this book focuses on voice rather than on participation.

Yet often in the social sciences, voice is simply equated with participation (e.g., Verba, Schlozman, and BradyReference Verba, Lehman Schlozman and Brady1995). When we cast a vote, we voice our electoral preferences. When we sign a petition, we voice our concern. When we become members of the Sierra Club, we voice support for environmental issues.¹⁴ Citizens thus seem to have culturally engrained and “civic duty” proven ways to assert voice, and we are used to exercising citizenship within a “dutiful citizen” model (BennettReference Bennett and Bennett2008). Yet there is mounting evidence that the dutiful citizen voice has lost some of its appeal. In most Western societies, voter turnout is declining. Political parties as historical catalysts of voter choice are losing members and credibility. Membership-based interest group organizations are experiencing recruitment problems (SkocpolReference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999a; PutnamReference Putnam2001). There is a clear trend away from established venues of civic duty and toward more individualized and personalized expression of voice (Bennett Reference Bennett1998; Delli CarpiniReference Delli Carpini and Kaid2004; Zukin et al. Reference Zukin, Keeter, Adonina, Jenkins and Delli Carpini2006), driven by “the presence of multiple participatory styles, in which the relationships between individuals’ attitudes or characteristics and their involvement varies across people” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl Reference Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl2012: 33).

More personalized styles of communication also produce different messages. In general, people seem to be more comfortable with asserting the personal rather than the social dimension of needs, illustrating what Hannah Pitkin has termed the difference between “I want” and “I am entitled to” (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1981: 347). Personal grievances make for a better public narrative than investigations of the social and political context in which they occur. Media like to disseminate and viewers or readers like to consume so-called authentic stories that feature the personally affected rather than the politically committed citizen. As a result, Nina Eliasoph finds, citizens tend to avoid publicly minded debate and instead have learned to speak about entitlement more in privatized, or what Goffman has termed “backstage” arenas (Goffman Reference Goffman1959; Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph1998).

This is where the nongovernmental sector comes in. Even though most NGOs today are not traditional membership associations, the sector's self-image is based on speaking up for collective entitlements. The women's NGO that pushes for transparency of the ingredients in cosmetics, the fair trade NGO that rallies consumers around buying coffee directly from small producers, or the environmental NGO that mobilizes against genetically modified food all act not simply on the grounds of “we want,” but on the grounds of “we as citizens are entitled to” or “the citizens we represent are entitled to.” As discussed earlier, NGOs advance normative claims toward a common good and act on these claims as public experts. Thus they are well positioned to generate, moderate, and synthesize “frontstage” public debate and to articulate and represent social grievances and entitlements to political institutions. In other words, they can produce or enhance the collective voice of their – real or imagined – constituents and amplify it into organizational voice in the public arena.

What do we know about how this organizational voice is being generated? Debra Minkoff and John McCarthy have provided an excellent overview of existing research on the organizational dimensions in social movement organizations and argue that much of this work has “developed independently from organizational theory” (Minkoff and McCarthy Reference Minkoff, Agnone, Anheier and Hammack2010: 291). Most studies, moreover, focus on organization ecology and its impact on organizational decision making, with little attention being given to how the environment influences an organization's public voice. Organization theories, if they address voice at all, tend to focus more on internal processes of speaking up than on the public voice of an organization. They construct voice as “the practices and structures that affect who can speak, when, and in what way” within an organization (Putnam, Phillips, and Chapman Reference Putnam, Phillips, Chapman, Clegg, Hardy and Nord2006: 389). Questions of external communication tend to be examined as “PR” activities, aimed at the marketing of messages. Yet NGO voice is more than a collection of press releases and staged PR events. Kenneth T. Andrews and colleagues recently argued that “civic associations provide a key mechanism through which citizens exercise voice by combining together to make claims in the public arena” (Andrews et al. Reference Andrews, Baggetta, Lim, Ganz and Han2010: 1196).¹⁵ Whether and in which contexts NGOs speak up tells us something about their role in the public sphere. Whom they publicly address, how they organize dialogue and engagement of constituents, and to what degree they are open to broad citizen input are all indicators of their capacity to nurture publics.

Whereas voice refers to speaking up in an undirected and general sense, advocacy means employing purposefully directed and instrumental voice. In advocacy, NGOs use voice with a specific intention and target in mind. In the broadest terms, any attempt to influence political decisions on behalf of an imagined or organized community can be termed advocacy. Some scholars distinguish between “rights-based” advocacy and “civic” advocacy (Boris and Mosher-Williams Reference Boris and Mosher-Williams1998) or between “political” advocacy that is directed at political institutions and “social” advocacy that tries to influence public opinion (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Powell and Steinberg2006: 309). Although these distinctions capture a vital difference in the location, direction, and targets of advocacy, I submit that we would be hard pressed to call some civic advocacy contexts, such as the civil rights movement, not rights-based or all public opinion campaigns non-political. These distinctions reflect a traditionally narrow way of understanding politics, in which what we see as political shrinks to the confines of government. However, many NGO campaigns today combine political and social advocacy; they expose institutional as well as civic features. To characterize these campaigns as nonpolitical is to dismiss the public sphere as a nonpolitical space of influence and the mobilization of constituents as a pre-political act.

This book suggests a different way to look at advocacy, one that distinguishes not between political and social vectors of influence, but instead focuses empirically on distinctive advocacy strategies and tools used to reach an intended outcome. The two modes of advocacy that best capture the role of NGOs in the public sphere are institutional and public advocacy. Institutional and public advocacy stand for different ways to seek influence, different repertoires of action, and different communication practices (see Fig. 1.1).

Institutional advocacy is the attempt to influence decision making by gaining some degree of insider status in institutions or in organizations that initiate, prepare, legislate, or execute policy change. Institutional advocacy strategies are primarily tailored to secure access to, and build relationships within, a given governance body or arena. NGOs might try to gain legitimacy by providing expertise, or they might build on a reputation of being effective project implementers to gain institutional leverage. The aim is to work constructively inside institutions to achieve policy success. Primary communication practices are the sharing of expert knowledge, insider debate, and lobbying.

Public advocacy, by contrast, attempts to achieve policy success by engaging broader publics and, at its most effective, actively stimulating citizen voice and engagement in the process. In its “thick” mode, public advocacy means employing strategies that allow for interactive communication with citizens. NGOs practicing public advocacy thus tailor their communication toward mobilizing, synthesizing, and amplifying citizen voices. In its more information-oriented “thinner” mode, public advocacy might mean utilizing public space by putting up a billboard or running an ad asking citizens to sign on to a predefined campaign or to join a single public event. Overall, public advocacy strategies are less driven by the attempt to gain insider status and more by a focus on outreach and on ways to organize and activate publics.

Institutional and public advocacy are not incompatible strategies to achieve policy change. In fact, NGOs might use both modes in different stages of a project or campaign or even at the same time. Institutional advocacy may gain more leverage if institutions perceive the NGOs as having the strong potential to engage in public campaigns and to have broad, actively supportive constituencies. In turn, public advocacy repertoires, such as campaigns or protests, can be more effective if, at the same time, lines of institutional communication are being established and held open. Optimizing insider/outsider navigation can be essential for successful NGO advocacy.

However, engaging in parallel insider/outsider advocacy also presents challenges for NGOs. In addition to having obvious limitations in terms of resources, competencies, and legal restrictions, NGOs might be faced with governance conditions that actively discourage or more subtly disincentivize public advocacy. Research on state–NGO relations indicates that invitations to sit at the table are most likely extended to NGOs whose message is in broad accordance with government agendas (Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff Reference Brinkerhoff and Brinkerhoff2002: 12ff.). NGOs with contentious or radical agendas, by contrast, are invited less often to the table. Compounding this institutional selectivity of who gets to be included is the fact that most governance bodies exhibit an informal code of conduct. NGOs thus might need to adapt to a specific institutional habitus in order to gain acceptance and trust in a specific governance context. This informal code of conduct in turn might diminish an NGO's willingness to advocate for specific politics through advocacy involving public contestation and citizen engagement. Governance conditions therefore are key to an NGO's commitment to public advocacy and engagement; they can influence the degree to which NGOs utilize institutional or public advocacy strategies or a combination to achieve policy success.

Bringing Governance In

Governance prioritizes process over conventional hierarchy and communicative over authoritative power. In its narrow sense, governance indicates the departure from a traditional government perspective by highlighting the arena in which governments network and cooperate with business and civil society. Or it can mean, in a broader sense, any kind of management of interdependent actors in which state institutions have become one player among many (MayntzReference Mayntz and Mayntz1998; BlumenthalReference Blumenthal2005). Throughout this book I employ the narrow use of the concept, in which governance stands for “a broader, more inclusive and encompassing process of coordination than the conventional view of government” (Peters and Pierre Reference Peters, Pierre, Bache and Flinders2004: 77). This definition points to an increased role of NGOs in generating and implementing policy, as well as in communicating policy in and with civil society (i.e., Warleigh Reference Warleigh2001; EdwardsReference Edwards2004; Boris and SteuerleReference Boris and Steuerle2006; JoachimReference Joachim2007; Heins Reference Heins2008). NGOs can be included in coordination processes in different ways, and governments still almost exclusively define the arenas and contexts in which they engage with nonstate actors. An “encompassing process of coordination” (Peters and Pierre Reference Peters, Pierre, Bache and Flinders2004: 77) with NGOs can mean different things. It might mean being asked to contribute a five-minute statement in a hearing; it might entail providing continuous and extensive expertise over time; NGOs might help write legislation, implement policy, or organize dialogue with civil society. In short, governance contexts do not have to create substantially more advocacy chances for NGOs during these coordination processes (i.e., Smismans Reference Smismans2006b), but in principle they can.

Moreover, with the expansion of policy arenas since the 1960s – horizontally for example in the fields of social justice and the environment, and vertically with the rising influence of international organizations – governments have increasingly become dependent on policy expertise residing within the NGO sector and thus have been compelled to establish coordination and communication venues. As late as the mid-20th century, governments did not have environmental agencies, women's policy units, or antidiscrimination offices. Neither did the European Union or the United Nations engage in the elaborate civil society consultations that they organize today. Now, when the European Union asks for civil society input, it calls on European NGOs to be that civil society and to provide aggregate assessments of what European citizens think about an issue. When the United Nations organizes civil society consultations, its main representatives are NGOs. Accepting NGOs as democratic partners is a requirement for states that have joined the Agenda 21 process.¹⁶ In fact, chapter 27 of the Agenda Charter demands that governments take measures to “establish or enhance an existing dialogue with non-governmental organizations and their self-organized networks.…[and] encourage and enable partnership and dialogue between local non-governmental organizations and local authorities in activities aimed at sustainable development” (United Nations 1992).

Inclusion of NGOs in governance is not confined to transnational and national arenas. In fact, the most vibrant and diverse governance arenas might be found in urban contexts where NGOs interact with government not only to secure funds and provide services but also to organize community involvement (i.e., Berry and AronsReference Berry, Portney and Thomson1993; Duncan and Thomas Reference Duncan and Thomas2000; Haus and HeineltReference Haus2005; see also Chapter 5). NGOs thus can be spotted as participants in City Hall hearings and in regional development councils. However, as in other arenas, there is no guarantee that local governance actually fosters substantially more involvement of civil society actors. As we explore in Chapter 5, governance can also mean consultative arrangements with a small number of privileged insider NGOs at the expense of the vast majority of local civil society actors. Local governance can take place in contexts with set rules and ultimately rely on pro forma symbolic inclusion processes. Yet, on the other hand, local governance arenas can enable NGOs to become public advocates and practice citizen engagement.

To sum up, governance is certainly no panacea for generating stronger NGO publics. Although government rationales for inviting NGOs to the table vary just as much as NGOs’ reasons to sit down at it, one shared interest is to gain legitimacy by representing interested and affected publics. NGOs that are included in governance may function as catalysts of the voices of these publics. This book investigates the validity of such claims.

The cases presented later will advance the following propositions on how governance modes might influence the degree to which NGOs employ public advocacy. NGOs tend to incubate, engage with, and mobilize publics most frequently under two governance conditions.

First, and this is the condition we are most familiar with, NGOs often choose to rely on public advocacy if they are shut out of, or are strongly marginalized in, a specific high-stake governance arena. If they are denied insider status, NGOs might use public advocacy to increase pressure and have their voice heard. Social movement research has built on this paradigm, arguing that a central condition for the emergence of social movements is exclusion from decision-making processes and lack of voice (TarrowReference Tarrow2005). Likewise, research on transnational advocacy networks suggests that protest mobilization, most often organized by NGOs, occurs across borders if direct access to national decision makers is blocked (Keck and SikkinkReference Keck and Sikkink1998). In these cases, it is the institutional outsider status that generates public voice.¹⁷

The second condition, which is less researched and acknowledged, is that NGOs can focus on generating publics if and when governments encourage them to do so. Specific governance modes, more than others, actively enable NGOs to generate public voice. This condition might be perceived as running counter to most liberal theorists’ claims that one imperative of a healthy civil society is its distance from government. It might sound equally suspicious to scholars who advance the Foucauldian governmentality paradigm or older regulation school theories. Both, for different and valid reasons, are wary of governments’ efforts to strengthen dialogue with civil society and more inclusive decision making.¹⁸ I submit that the capacity of NGOs becoming stronger public advocates lies neither with individual actors, organizations, nor the state alone. It lies squarely in between these forces, but government is at this point the most underestimated promoter, and therefore the least politically targeted motor of this kind of civic renewal.

Yet both these conditions – complete exclusion from institutional venues and active enabling of public voice by governments – are outliers in the overall advocacy topography of late modern societies. Although state actors might accept NGOs at the table, many have little interest in helping NGOs generate public voice. For NGOs, in turn, institutional advocacy has fewer opportunity costs than the mobilization of publics. As a result, public voice of the NGO sector is overestimated and NGOs perform as “proxy publics”: In lieu of actually engaging their broader constituencies, the organizations themselves have become stand-ins for citizen participation and public outreach. This might look like a win-win arrangement for both governments and NGOs, but it is a losing proposition for the strengthening of late modern democracy and its publics.

Cases and Data

Empirical studies of NGO-driven mobilization tend to focus on prominent, publicly visible, and mostly successful campaigns in the international arena, such as the Greenpeace Brent Spar campaign, the ban on landmines, and the WTO protests, or on abortion laws or migrant rights in national contexts. Yet doing so risks turning NGO public sphere effects into mere artifacts of peak campaign events. Extrapolating NGO advocacy from these peak moments might limit our understanding of the overall dynamics of NGO communication and action in the public sphere. Instead, the cases that drive and illustrate the argument presented here are drawn from unspectacular places during unspectacular times. They provide insights into routinized NGO action and into the challenges of generating public voice and contributing to the public sphere in a comparative perspective. The study combines deductive and inductive as well as quantitative and qualitative methods to capture NGO voice. In Chapters 2–4, the more conceptual and deductive chapters, the hypotheses and theoretical claims are laid out with references to a broad range of evidence and examples drawn from already available research. Chapters 5 and 6 are painted with a thicker empirical brush: The NGO territory explored there with illustrative case studies spans three polities and ranges in size from the local to the transnational. Germany, the European Union, and the United States provide the core of the data.

Germany and the United States each have strong traditions in theory-building on civil society, fueled by Hegel, Jefferson, as well as Tocqueville's French perspective on democracy in America. Both have historically vibrant, yet very differently structured associational cultures. In Germany, for most of the 20th century, a limited number of primarily state-supported NGOs were cornerstones of an organizationally strong, yet also stagnant civic sector (Anheier and Seibel Reference Anheier and Seibel2001). In the United States, by contrast, we encounter a multilayered, rather ubiquitous civic landscape with a wide array of organizational diversity and a public/private mix of funding sources (SkocpolReference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999a). Although this statist-pluralist distinction might invite immediate conclusions to the effect that the polyarchic structure of American governance and its more diverse funding sources allow for a stronger NGO role in serving as a catalyst for public voice, this study does not support the state-centered versus pluralist argument. Instead, the findings presented later suggest that the influence of national political cultures is less an independent than an intervening variable. The explanations for whether NGOs function as catalyst or proxy for a vibrant public sphere instead point toward more fine-grained institutional, political, and communicative relationships between governments and NGOs that seem to cut across broad system types such as the corporatist–pluralist one.

A second reason for employing data from Germany, the United States, and the EU is that all three polities have federalized or multilevel governance structures. Multilevel governance has become increasingly central to the nongovernmental sector's operations, forcing NGOs to engage with and adapt to different layers of power, yet also opening up strategic space for advocacy on multiple levels (RisseReference Risse, Carlsnäs, Risse and Simmons2001; Khagram et al. Reference Khagram, Riker and Sikkink2002). As NGOs and their networks learn to act on multiple levels of governance, advocacy success might be the result of having created a boomerang (Keck and SikkinkReference Keck and Sikkink1998) or ping-pong effect (Zippel Reference Zippel2006), in which several arenas or levels of governance are involved. In Germany, for example, local NGOs have employed European Union directives to bring about policy change in municipalities. NGOs also operate with mixed funding from city, state, and national agencies, as well as the European Union; transnational NGOs and their networks in Brussels, in turn, cooperate with regional or national NGOs (WarleighReference Warleigh2001; Haus and HeineltReference Haus and Heinelt2002). Studying NGO voice within these multilevel governance structures highlights how differently scaled government–NGO relations invite or regulate advocacy.

I do not claim to cover all NGO advocacy in these three polities. Instead, this book presents an empirical border investigation. It examines NGO advocacy and its public engagement effects at their organizational margins: in the small arena of local advocacy, as well as in its largest form on the transnational level. The study emphasizes local and transnational modes of NGO advocacy because both local and transnational civil societies have in recent years been identified as the most promising sites for reinvigorated publics based on innovative strategies to engage citizens in public deliberation and advocacy (Sirianni and FriedlandReference Sirianni and Friedland2001; Warkentin Reference Warkentin2001; Kaldor Reference Kaldor2003b; Keane Reference Keane2003; NanzReference Nanz2006). The local level provides highly textured evidence of the role of NGOs as public advocates and, moreover, is commonly perceived as the most fertile ground for studying dynamic environments for civic engagement and political participation (cf. Dahl and the pluralist tradition through Putnam). The transnational level has gained attention for providing NGOs with means to circumvent nonresponsive national governments (Keck and Sikkink Reference Keck and Sikkink1998) and to enhance their public visibility through association with international institutions. Transnational NGOs are considered to be the seeds of global civil society (Kaldor Reference Kaldor2003b). Many national NGOs in Europe and the United States, in contrast, suffer from bureaucratization and from the effects of being close to power centers and having turned into prime lobbying businesses. As a consequence, most of these national “advocates without members” (SkocpolReference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999a, Reference Skocpol2003) are less prone to employ innovative forms of civic and public communication (Anheier and Seibel Reference Anheier and Seibel2001). In cases where national NGOs have developed more citizen-oriented forms of advocacy, they tend to cooperate with local NGOs (SkocpolReference Skocpol2003). In short, at this point it is local and transnational NGOs that provide the most stimulating cases for researching NGO voice.

Specific case selection within local and transnational NGO advocacy was determined by a “best fit” model based on two assumptions: One, that NGOs’ public advocacy is more salient in issue areas with long-standing politicization, and, two, that it is stronger in issue areas with historically strong associational cultures. Thus NGOs would be most likely to emphasize being catalysts of public voice in policy fields where citizen voice is traditionally strong. I identified urban development and gender as two policy arenas that fit this mold: Both are characterized historically by a substantial NGO presence and by engaged and publicly vocal constituents.

The first case study investigates arenas of public voice of the nongovernmental sector in urban development in three U.S. and three German cities: San Diego, Oakland, and Seattle in the United States and Leipzig, Berlin, and Bremen in Germany. These cities were selected to represent, in a comparative perspective, cities with differing strengths of social capital or civic engagement,¹⁹ thus addressing claims that NGOs might display stronger public advocacy in cities with higher social capital and that in effect, social capital is the prime independent variable in analyzing NGO advocacy. Within each city, I identified one or two “hot” urban development issues according to criteria that are explained in more detail in Chapter 5. Institutional and public advocacy efforts by local NGOs regarding these issues formed the starting point for 60 interviews with NGO, government, and media representatives in these six cities. In the course of follow-up sessions, questions were broadened to include NGOs’ role in civil society, their engagement with and means of advocacy, and their interactions with government more generally. I met some interviewees several times in roughly two-year intervals, and others I followed up with phone interviews, thus enabling me to gauge changes in advocacy over time. Although the interviewees were granted anonymity, their general affiliations are identified in Appendix 1. I collected the data between 2000 and 2007. The interviews were conducted using a semi-open format, transcribed, and analyzed. Additionally, during several visits to each city, I observed meetings and events; over time I collected printed and online materials, and followed newsletters and blogs to assess to what degree and with what kinds of strategies NGOs practiced advocacy.

The second case investigates transnational women's NGO advocacy in the European Union. Again, the task was to examine the push and pull factors that influence the practices of public engagement and advocacy. I identified five transnational NGO networks in different policy arenas according to size and representativeness and then assembled three data sets. The first set consists of interviews with directors/board representatives and members of the networks. The interviews were structured (1) to gauge strategies to influence frames, policies, and practices and (2) to examine the availability and use of specific resources and tools for outreach and advocacy. I conducted interviews between 2005 and 2008 at two nodes of the networks: with representatives of the central network structure and of member NGOs in Germany, the United Kingdom, and in Poland. The second set of data uses the networks’ web presence to investigate how women's NGOs and their networks present their advocacy work via the web and to what degree they utilize web-based tools for public engagement and advocacy. This data set reflects the fact that the web has developed into a fast and low-cost communication tool for strategic action among civic groups (Castells and Cardoso Reference Castells and Cardoso2006). Because these five NGO networks span multiple European cultures and languages, their websites serve as central and widely accessible focal points for joint discursive frames and collective action.

The third set of data in Chapter 6 consists of network maps generated by the Issue Crawler software developed by Richard Rogers from the University of Amsterdam. The Issue Crawler maps the links among websites and thus provides heuristic evidence of networking activities such as joint agendas, projects, or mere informational exchange relationships. This network tool can be used to assess relative networking strength and gauge the capacity to engage in joint public advocacy. More detail on methods is provided in Chapters 5 and 6 and in the appendices.

I cannot claim to do justice to the empirical variety of NGOs in both countries, in the six cities I compare, or in the civil society arenas of the European Union. Laws, political institutions, governance arrangements, and engrained communication cultures in each locality, country, or supranational arena necessarily differ. Nevertheless, by identifying relevant factors that define NGOs’ advocacy capacity in different countries and on different governance levels, my intention is to contribute to a meso-level theory about the role of NGOs as incubators of publics in late modern democracy. I hope that others will test this proposition in other empirical contexts.

How The Book Proceeds

The starting point in the next chapter is an exploration of theories of civil society. The intent is to capture how dominant theories conceptualize – or ignore – the public sphere. Building on a critical reading of Jürgen Habermas's work, the focus is to introduce dimensions of the public sphere and, more specifically, of organizational voice and advocacy into civil society theories. In Chapter 3 I explore the idea that civil society's primary mode of organization in the 21st century is found in the expanding nongovernmental sector. I argue that civil society is becoming “NGOized” and that NGOization has implications for voice and advocacy. This chapter also engages with a commonly held assumption that a large NGOized civil society produces a vibrant civic culture and strengthens public communication and participatory democracy. Chapter 4 then focuses on the governance conditions in which NGOs operate, the institutional constraints they confront, and some successful attempts to practice public advocacy in conjunction with government assistance. Of particular interest here are legal constraints that NGOs face when practicing public advocacy, the insider-outsider dynamics of “speaking up,” and perceptions of NGOs as proxy publics. This theoretical framework is then tested in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 addresses the question of what enables NGOs to engage in public advocacy in urban publics in the United States and Germany. In Chapter 6, I turn from the local to the transnational level and assess women's NGOs’ transnational activism in the European Union. Finally, the conclusion summarizes my argument that across a broad spectrum of cases NGOs today serve more as proxy publics than as catalysts of public voice. Yet, and this marks the “light at the end of the tunnel,” by the end of this book I will also have identified conditions that enable NGOs to strengthen their function as incubators for public engagement and advocacy. In more theoretical terms, I argue that the performance of civil society as a public sphere depends significantly on institutionalized regulatory frameworks and cultures of governance. As Charles Tilly recently put it, “We should doubt that associations as such hold the key to democratic participation. Instead, we should recognize that the forms of relations between trust networks and public politics matter deeply” (Tilly Reference Tilly2007: 94).

Figure 1.1. Public Advocacy and Institutional Advocacy. Source: Model adapted with modifications from Pettigrew 1990 and Dechalert 1999.