Shifting Inter-Organizational Relations & Insider-Outsider Strategies in Transnational Environmental and Women’s Activism

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political economy, and these changes have been both shaped by and affect the activities and interventions of transnational activist networks. Activist framings of issues and the strategies they develop have changed over time based on both the escalation of conflicts over critical issues and activists’ experiences engaging across geographical and other divides and working to affect global and national policies and practices. Drawing from a newly updated dataset of organizational records in the Yearbook of International Organizations (1983-2013), we examine patterns of transnational organizing around the highly polarized issues of women’s rights and environmentalism to examine changes in how these different activist networks engage with inter-governmental organizations and with other international nongovernmental organizations during a period of heightened tensions and “critical balances” over the future directions of the international system. We identify three categories of TSMOs based on their connections to IGOs, which reflect their relative emphasis of insider or outsider strategies.Multilateralists are linked to a wide and diverse array of international agencies, while pragmatists are more specialized and selective in their ties. A third category of isolationists operates outside the formal inter-state arena, engaging an outsider strategy in relation to the inter-state system. Newer groups, and especially women’s groups, were more likely than more established TSMOs to be isolationists, advancing their social change work outside the existing inter-state order. Yet many more recently founded TSMOs, especially environmental ones, are using insider strategies, maintaining ties to operational types of IGOs, specifically treaties and monitoring bodies. We interpret these changes in this population in light of the changing geopolitical, institutional, and social movement context.