Small Ngos In Global Governance PDF Download

International relations theories have conceptualized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as, inter alia, agenda setters for global governance. To date, existing research on NGO agenda setting has overwhelmingly focused on how advocacy is supplied by well-established, leading NGOs, but overlooked how and why advocacy is demanded in the first place. Contrary to the assumption that small NGOs are "bandwagoners," I argue that small NGOs substantially influence the variation of issue salience in a given issue area due to the interdependence of demand and supply in the advocacy market. Drawing on the insight of public opinion research, I argue that the demand for advocacy is concentrated in a small segment of the public, referred to as the issue public. Leading NGOs cannot target their advocacy to the issue public alone because they cannot maintain their social and economic resources with a small segment of the public. By contrast, small NGOs can frame their advocacy to resonate with the identities and shared values of the issue public. The stability of attention from the issue public legitimates small NGOs' agenda and allows them to exercise influence over policymakers with expert knowledge. The implications are important: the existing literature overestimates the agenda-setting power of leading NGOs while trivializing small NGOs' issue entrepreneurship. I evaluate my theory in the issue area of biodiversity and wildlife conservation to overcome a persistent problem in the study of NGO agenda setting: selection bias. As NGOs cannot advocate for non-existent species, all conservation issues are observable regardless of the outcome of advocacy work. Three empirical tests were conducted. First, I quantitatively explored the relationship between small NGOs and issue salience among Northern publics, leveraging the computational text analysis of 20,000 newspaper articles and 350,000 mission statements. Second, I analyzed the causal linkage between types of NGOs, locational issue characteristics, and their interaction with survey experiments in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Finally, I qualitatively investigated the recent case of issue emergence, pangolin (scaly anteater) conservation, through in-depth interviews. I conclude with the reviews of my overall findings and contributions and potential applications for future research.