Conference Agenda

For decades, environmental activists in European countries have formed a well-informed minority, acting as a vanguard for change in the protection of environmental rights.

Emerging in response to the failure of public authorities to address environmental concerns, this activism gradually influenced political actors, leading to the growing recognition of civil society’s demands. As a result, new tools for participation and protection were developed, and shared environmental values became increasingly codified in law, laying the groundwork for administrative and judicial safeguards.

Today, the pursuit of effective protection for everyone’s right to a healthy environment introduces new dimensions of radical environmentalism. In this context, strengthening governance at the early stages of decision-making and ensuring unrestricted access to environmental, criminal, and administrative justice represent transformative forms of action with the potential to significantly impact environmental democracy.

Drawing on EU and national case law, legislation, and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, this paper examines the three pillars of the Aarhus Convention through the lens of eco-legal activism.

How can we explain public mobilisation for green-left politics in the post-socialist, post-Yugoslav countries of Croatia and Serbia? The recent electoral success of the political parties such as Možemo and Zeleno-levi front show that a change occurred in the ways citizens in these countries engage with politics, both on the streets and at the polling stations. Most of the current scholarship tackling this topic focuses on the profiling of movement parties and the evolution of their electoral strategies, especially through developing innovative activist repertoires and the diffusion of campaign tactics throughout the sites of contention (see, for instance, Kralj 2022, 2023; Milan 2023; Milan and Dolenec 2023). While the available literature provides valuable insights, we’re often missing a deeper understanding of the specific positions and roles of different actors in these developments.

This Paper advances the proposal that independent cultural organisations, a specific set of civil society actors, are one of the key factors in public mobilisation for green-left politics in Croatia and Serbia. Their contribution to catalysing social movements suggests a more dynamic role for civil society actors than the literature on democratisation in former Yugoslav territories suggests (see, for instance, Mikuš 2018; Vetta 2018).

Rooted in close observation of the sector’s activities as both practitioner and scholar, this Paper uses a range of electronic and archival sources to demonstrate how independent cultural organisations shifted the traditional function of civil society actors by instigating social movements centred around public interest and citizen participation.

The literature examining transnational advocacy networks and their role in human rights promotion tends to focus on boomerang patterns, examining whether and how international contacts amplify local activists’ voices, help them to influence international stakeholders and thus, by extension, their own local governments. Less attention has been devoted to understanding how cooperation and interaction within transnational networks allows activists to learn from each other – both how to navigate oppressive domestic conditions as well as how to engage with and influence external stakeholders. To better understand such learning processes in the Euro-Mediterranean region, this paper zooms in on EuroMed Rights’ Majalat project, a structural dialogue between the EU and civil society in the Southern Mediterranean that ran from 2018 to 2021. In line with the objectives of this special issue, the article unpacks whether, and if so how, collaboration in the Majalat project led to knowledge transfer and the diffusion of practices among participating activists from different Arab countries. It examines whether and what they learned from each other on how to deal with their domestic political situation as well as on how to influence EU officials and policy makers. In doing so, the paper seeks to better understand to what extent and how learnings in transnational advocacy networks allow civil society activists to achieve policy changes.

This article examines how Non-Governmental Organizations’ (NGOs) select their institutional donor (EU member states or DG ECHO) depending on their humanitarian project. NGOs, amongst a variety of humanitarian actors, collaborate with various institutional donors to implement aid in the field in response to climate and man-made crises. The EU’s humanitarian aid architecture offers a dichotomic choice between two distinct funding opportunities for these same NGOs: the EU Commission (through DG ECHO) or the EU member states. Indeed, member states, while delegating humanitarian aid management to DG ECHO, maintain their respective national programs. Although one would expect that institutional donors solely select their implementing partners, the reverse is also true: NGOs select their institutional donors’ with whom they collaborate with, depending on the project or crisis. This article answers thus to the following questions: Why do NGOs opt for a cherry-picking strategy towards institutional donors? What explains that NGOs select national funders versus the EU as a funder? A comparison of six cases composed of three NGOs (Solidarités internationales, Save the Children and Care) in two different crises (Afghanistan and Yemen) relied on semi-structured interviews combined with a quantitative analysis of selected NGOs’ funding relationships. Counterbalancing the dominant literature focusing on donors, the article finds that NGOs develop a cherry-picking strategy. The latter is explained by variations in institutional donors’ means (i.e. level of control), rationales (i.e. political priorities) and structure (i.e. (de-)centralized administration). Moreover, NGOs select donors depending on the content of their projects in line with donors’ preferences, rationales. Finally, the article also discovers that NGOs use salami tactics, navigating through the funding architecture by slicing their projects into different parts catered for different donors.

Research has highlighted the importance of the EU-level associations as a critical channel to approach the EU multilevel game and shape policy processes (Green Cowles 2002). Civil society organisations have particularly been instrumental in using the EU level to push for ambitious policies, pressure national authorities and potentially circumvent them (Mazey 2002, Lowe and Ward 1998). Domestic interest groups have nevertheless invested uneven time and resources in Brussels-based networks, depending on their capacity and strategic foresesight. The departure of the United-Kingdom has changed the political opportunity structure for UK interest groups, and thus the incentives in joining a European network of similar organisations (Woollen and Chalmers 2024, Minto 2020).

This paper addresses the engagement of British environmental organisations within their European networks since Brexit, thus reflecting on the logics of collective action behind the EU-level associations. British organisations have actively participated in their formation and activities, including capacity-building. Drawing on the literature on the formation and maintenance of coalitions (Hula 1999, Aspinwall and Greenwood 1998), the analysis will focus on the collective and selective incentives provided by the EU organisations in an evolving context. From the Brexit negotiations until the entry into force of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, this case-study offers a contrasted picture of the ongoing and changing relationship between UK and EU policy actors in a sector where cooperation had proven successful.