Who Governs Access and Voice of Civil Society in Global Governance? Practice Theory, Reflexivity and Power in the Study of International Organisations’ “Opening Up”

ABSTRACT

In this concluding reflection, we value the special issue’s focus on how power asymmetries among civil society organisations (CSOs) affect their relations with international organisations (IOs) and micro-level dynamics of in – and exclusion. Yet we propose to pay further attention to the crisis of liberal institutions and the shrinking spaces provided to some CSOs . We also encourage revisiting the liberal assumption that CSOs seek to democratise IOs and the proposition that the majority of CSOs are keen to cooperate with IOs. The pressing question for us is not how CSOs push in- or exclusion in IOs but how dynamics of in- and exclusion are generated in the web of practices performed by diverse actors. In our perspective, the question is best addressed in reflexive research that is aware of power relations, the methodological difficulties of researching CSOs and often inaccessible IOs, and the dangers of silencing non-academic voices.

KEYWORDS:

• Practice theory
• international organisations
• civil society
• power
• reflexivity

Introduction

This Special Issue (SI) engages with popular scholarly debates about global democracy, using practice theory to shed new light on international organisations (IOs) becoming increasingly accessible to civil society organisations (CSOs). Influential studies have shown that IOs interact with CSOs to different degrees and permit access mainly to well-organised Western CSOs holding moderate views (Tallberg et al. 2013). These studies have, essentially, two limitations to them: First, they place IOs centre stage and, thus, understand “opening up” as a process largely governed or even policed by IOs themselves, depending on their functional demands for specific resources and legitimacy. Second, while they help to identify the main causes of accessibility across the IO spectrum, they do not account for micro-level dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (Holthaus 2021).

Depending on their particular theoretical persugpective and empirical focus, the contributions to this SI can thus be understood as either extensions to or critiques of theories on the permeability of IOs vis-à-vis civil society advocates. In their introduction to this SI, the editors suggest understanding IOs’ varying forms of opening up to CSOs as a set of social practices which reproduce, contest, or transform the hierarchical global order(s). The individual contributions convincingly show how such a perspective can help qualify the proposition that IOs have become increasingly accessible to a diversifying global civil society landscape, resulting in conclusions of “accessible, but … ” being reached. They also enrich the debate by studying non-Western IOs which have previously received little attention (Mace 2023) as well as the power relations and dynamics playing out between different CSOs (Knappe 2023).¹

We see the SI as an important contribution to what is an ongoing debate and would like to provide a concluding reflection which may serve to extend its contours even further. Two points in particular will be raised in the remainder of this piece: First, we identify the necessity of revisiting the “opening up” debate in light of the popular diagnosis of a contestation of liberal international institutions as well as of the “shrinking space” available to CSOs regarding global governance (Wolff 2023). Relatedly, we are concerned that an underspecified conceptualisation of civil society or “non-state actor” (NSA) may, in the best of cases, fail to capture the extraordinary differences in power and proximity to IOs among those we define as “non-state”. In the worst of cases, meanwhile, this leads to an outdated portrayal of who has access to IOs and of the extent to which IOs themselves are still able to define the rules and boundaries of interaction with NSAs. Second, we reflect on the value and limitations of practice theory in this SI as regards capturing the full spectrum of agency and interventions, particularly by those CSOs diagnosed as marginalised, while calling also for further reflexivity in the study of power and exclusion in global governance.

Who governs the access and voice of civil society in global governance? Thinking beyond state-centric International Relations theories on IO–civil society relations

This SI is published at a time when all international bodies associated with the post-World War II and post-Cold War (arguably liberal) institutional order find themselves subject to enormous contestation from a number of different directions, ranging from illiberal, authoritarian and populist governments and networks to the state and societal actors traditionally holding an inferior position within these organisational entities. The respective contributions take stock of the contemporary politics of civil society participation in international institutions, drawing on influential theories on the causes and consequences of the increasing permeability of IOs when it comes to a multitude of different NSAs. Without doubt, they all highlight the extent to which NSAs have become, by now, part and parcel of global governance, as shapers, contesters, experts, agenda-setters, entre- and anti-preneurs, as well as implementers of international norms and rules. They each give very convincing accounts of the chasm existing between IOs’ normative aspirations – reflected in discursive claims to be democratic, inclusive and diverse – on the one hand and the perpetuation of entrenched structural inequalities and epistemic and normative orders governing the interactions between IOs and transnational civil society on the other.

Starting from the diagnosis of a mind-boggling variety and number of NSAs connected to IOs and the gaining of access to pertinent spaces of international politics, the SI adds to the scholarship seeking to highlight the potential disparity existing between the enormous quantity of NSAs interacting with IOs and their actual impact on international rule- and policymaking. Drawing on practice theory, the SI contributions explore IO–NSA interactions at the micro level – bringing to light how these practices produce, enact, contest and potentially transform global order(s). They make an original contribution to the literature on IO–NSA relationships by closely examining attempts at more inclusive forms of global governance on the ground and by providing detailed empirical accounts of the realities of global democracy which NSAs must confront – mostly with a view to providing a corrective to the shallow understanding that access equals democracy, diversity and, potentially, transformation. Drawing on seminal critical theories of colonial power and hierarchy (Sondarjee 2023) as well as epistemic injustices, the respective contributions by and large paint a rather bleak picture of inclusive global governance in the 21st century. And yet, while they confront the liberal normativity of theories on IO democracy and opening up they shy away from exposing their own normativity as regards labels of exclusion, marginalisation and inferiority. While their practice-focused empirical research provides excellent accounts of the perpetuation of hierarchical orders, despite claims of diversity and democracy, the questions of who, in fact, is excluded (access and articulation) from spaces of global governance and in what direction these CSOs may take “democratic” transformation are left unanswered.

The SI is embedded in an ever-expanding field of research on the transformation of international institutions, following their increasing permeability by NSAs of all types since the early 1990s – but particularly since the early years of the new century. To date, however, and with the consolidation of the notion of “global governance” as ranging from governance with governments to governance without governments (Peters and Pierre 1998), the juxtaposition of intergovernmental institutions / IOs and transnational civil society must now be reconsidered (Grigorescu 2020). While some examples, such as the World Bank, appear to be prototypical IOs (Holthaus 2021), many actors do not neatly fit such a categorisation or their practices betray their de jure identity. For example, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance was intended as a foundation, became an IO in the negotiations leading to its establishment and invented practices resembling those of think tanks and non-governmental organisations rather than of prototypical IOs.

In addition, the traditional juxtaposition of IOs and transnational civil society is problematic because it implies that the former are more powerful actors than the latter. The rise of multi-bi aid or the example of the influence of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Wellcome Trust on the World Health Organisation (WHO) imply that IOs cannot, in fact, be treated as the more powerful actors per se. Rather, the concrete positions of actors hard to categorise and the power relations playing out between them become key research themes. Some actors may also position themselves by boycotting the opening up of IOs – a dynamic which has, a couple of exceptions aside (Anderl and Hißen 2024; Hofferberth and Lambach 2022; Holzscheiter 2018) received little scholarly attention so far.

In light of existing studies on both the political economy of global civil society (Cooley and Ron 2010), the strong power asymmetries existing between civil society actors (Stroup and Wong 2017) and, most importantly, the powerful hybrid networks of advocacy and expertise surrounding IOs (Stone 2019; Tsingou 2014), subsequent enquiry, it seems, needs to explore more than IO-led “opening up” to NSAs. As recent research on (the economic forces behind) algorithmic governance (Srivastava 2023) or the exceptional power of big tech, transnational corporations or philanthropic foundations reveal (Kalfagianni 2022), the drivers of and processes involved in both opening up to and closing down civil society appear to have become messier and more obscure. The insights delivered by the authors referenced above should make us reconsider the prevailing idea that it is exclusively state-centred international institutions which set the rules of interaction when it comes to dealing with NSAs – and that it is only the former which have an interest in keeping certain non-state actors at bay. As Holzscheiter has shown (Holzscheiter 2018), it is in some cases established CSOs with a long tradition of collaboration with IOs themselves who speak in favour of restricting CSO access, fearing that competition from groups of disaffected people or ones questioning their representative claims may undermine their authority.

On the basis of the above observations, one may legitimately ask to what extent the critical revisiting of IR literature on IOs, as the most pertinent sites of global democracy, is itself ridden with a certain liberal bias. The neat juxtaposition, in fact, of intergovernmental institutions and transnational civil society replicates ideal-type liberal understandings of the state–society dichotomy. It obstructs our ability to acknowledge the bandwidth of non-state actors and to address the fundamental question if the dynamics driving their interactions with IOs might be incredibly varied. This should also give reason to reconsider any assumption of power asymmetries always working in favour of IOs – considering how much earmarked funding flows into some IOs, particularly those working on development issues. Generally speaking, we thus argue in favour of a more nuanced conceptualisation of both IOs and transnational non-state actors, as underpinning vital research on questions of inequality, injustice and exclusion in global governance.

Practice theory, IO accessibility and the reflexive study of micro-practices of exclusion

The second point we would like to raise in our concluding reflections on the SI relates to the choice of practice theory for the study of the micro-politics of IO–civil society interactions. All of the contributions have engaged with practice theory, sometimes in combination with theories of political representation and participation, with the aim of capturing the everyday dynamics of civil society’s involvement in global governance. Even though there are different understandings of practice theory on show – some contributions (Cromm 2024) draw on it being a social theory which helps make sense of different expressions of power while others treat practice theory more as a methodology (Mace 2023) – the various works, taken together, convincingly demonstrate that analysing practices allows bridging the macro–micro divide. The goal here is studying the effects, contestation and potential transformation of normative, discursive and institutional orders by means of examining the concrete social and discursive practices reflective of those (changing) orders.

However, inspection of the methodological proceedings underpinning the contributions making up this SI brings to the fore the difficulties encountered in the analysis of the practices constituting global governance. The reconstruction of order as well as of relations of power and hierarchy through practice relies, in many cases, on archival evidence – sometimes coupled with interview data. Even where this documents informal patterns of “doing things’, it is still data retrieved from the archives, repositories and websites of IOs themselves. The methodological gold standard of practice-focused social science research – i.e. fieldwork and participant observation – is, in many cases, foreclosed by the inaccessibility of global-governance sites or by a lack of resources on the part of researchers seeking to be present at those locations (see also Holthaus 2020; Nair 2021).

The individual contributions are strong in their identification of “established ways of doing things’ when it comes to global governance – particularly where they show that the increasing access of CSOs has not necessarily changed democracy and diversity in IOs’ established habitus to any significant extent (as with youth in Knappe’s article). But their focus on both formal and informal norms and rules guiding IOs’ behaviour towards CSOs and on accounting for the nature of their day-to-day interactions leaves their assessment of exclusion, silencing, tokenist participation or CSOs’ marginalisation incomplete, reinforcing rather than challenging available knowledge on IO–CSO relations. On the one hand, certain civil society actors and organisations clearly distance themselves from IOs in their relevant policy field – the assumption that they would all want to set foot on their premises (as, for example, in the case of youth) is still to be tested regarding the reality of CSO activism. On the other, many CSOs do accept the participatory parameters established by IOs without much contestation or dissent as they may eventually benefit from the exclusion or “organising out” of uncomfortable peers. Ultimately, thus, more empirical evidence and more CSO-focused research on accessibility and leverage is needed if we are to account for the whole spectrum of practices – from cooperation to contestation – characterising the relationship between actors who may even ultimately fall into very different categories of IOs and CSOs.

In view of these research foci and the diagnosed need to direct greater attention to actors such as CSOs, we call for further reflexivity in the study of power relations and exclusion regarding diverse types of protagonists. Reflexivity is the practice of making conscious and explicit our dispositions, beliefs and proceedings (Alejandro 2021). Particularly those scholars following Bourdieu ask for greater consideration to be given to the power relations existing within academic fields and between academic and other social fields, as potentially shaping assumptions and applied frameworks here. They also elaborate on the manifold exercises of symbolic violence which can arise when scholars with theory-driven interests and particular assumptions and concepts in mind try to give meaning to the unintentional practices of these agents themselves (Bueger 2021). A reflexivity perspective reiterates the argument that we need to treat concepts such as “IOs" with care, alongside synergising it with an interest in power relations and the exercising of symbolic power in particular. Symbolic violence is performed when, through the invention and application of particular concepts, an agent imposes their worldview onto others within academic debates (Bourdieu 2004, 55), or when they use their position to silence non-academic voices (Vlavonou 2022). Symbolic violence is always likely but can be reined in, albeit not completely avoided, through listening, the creation and interpretation of data by affected agents themselves, as well as meticulous practice tracing (Bourdieu et al. 1999, 609).

In the interst of reflexivity, it is critial to pause for a moment when it comes to taken-for-granted assumptions – for example, about the power relations between IOs and CSOs – and the use of terms like “democracy” and “practice”, among others. While CSOs have given meaning to the term “democracy” in confronting IOs and following the famous “Battle of Seattle” of 1999 (Vidal 1999), debates about the virtues of different versions of representative, deliberative or pluralist (global) democracy have developed a life of their own in the academic field (Kuyper 2015). For long, (IR) scholars accepted that the most promising route to global democracy is CSO participation and representation, even if those who favour involving the people most impacted hereby challenge such a focus on CSOs. In the context of the SI to hand, understandings of the term “democracy” relate to this CSO representation and participation and are particularly focused on patterns of in- and exclusion among these particular organisations. The authors, rather than activists, decide about these patterns and we read relatively little about how they (methodologically) arrived at their decisions, the problems they faced when making them² or regarding CSOs’ conceptual struggles over the meaning of “democracy”, their conscious abandoning of the term or the difficult relationship between activists’ demands for both global democracy and global justice.

In addition, reflexivity and the avoidance of symbolic violence are equally important in the identification and understanding of practices. While the editors seise on the focus on the latter and the most common related definitions in IR, the demand of identifying practices, as well as of distinguishing them from other social phenomena such as processes (Kustermans 2016),³ deserves further attention. Bourdieu, though he carefully defined other terms, never clarified what he meant by “practice” (Ringmar 2014, 9), providing only the “thinking tools’ (Leander 2008) which ought to be used creatively in inductive empirical analysis. From a Bourdieusian perspective, then, greater methodological experimentation, careful consideration of research assumptions and inductive practice tracing can bring further reflexivity to the debate on IOs’ opening up.

In the SI, as in much practice theorising, there is a focus on enduring power structures, patterned practices and involuntary exclusion. Yet, these theoretical tools can also be used to focus in on practices which may prompt questions about the presumed identity of the actor in question, as well as on hybrid practices. In his own study of postcolonial contexts, Bourdieu emphasised the hybridity of practices – noting that the very same ones could assume different meanings from the perspective of the actor who performs the practice in question (Bourdieu and Sayad, 2015: 118).⁴ Bourdieu’s observations suggest that CSOs may conceive of the boycott of IOs as an act of self-agentification in one situation and as a surrender in view of problematic power structures in another. Such meaning-making deserves further consideration; paying close attention to it may become a source of irritation helping unsettle inherited assumptions about “IOs’ and “CSOs’ and the power games playing out between them.

Conclusion

In the preceding paragraphs, we have emphasised the necessity of revisiting the “opening up” debate in view of the current crisis of liberal institutions and shrinking space available to CSOs when it comes to global governance. Particularly CSOs operating from countries and regions that experience a return to authoritarianism and democractic backsliding are affected hereby. These trends imply that the massive inequalities existing between CSOs are only increasing; they also suggest the much-debated “opening up” of IOs is less a process governed by the latter themselves and rather one influenced by the opportunities available to and conscious choices of remarkably different types of CSOs.

We also propose rethinking the by now unchallenged idea that CSOs – or NSAs more generally – are drivers of democratisation vis-à-vis IOs. This problematic view rests on a highly positive understanding of CSOs and marginalises the role of elitist organisations, CSOs “orchestrating” access and the power of those CSOs representing financial or business interests. Most importantly, the juxtaposition of IOs and CSOs lacks historical plausibility and cannot be sustained in light of recent studies regarding the diverse actors whose de jure identities tell us little about their positions and practices in global governance. The pressing question here, then, is not how CSOs further in- or exclusion as regards IOs but how such dynamics are even generated amid the web of practices performed by diverse actors.

We have asked our colleagues and other scholars to deploy the notion of “democracy” only with great care when it comes to scrutinising the workings of IOs and global governance alike. While the idea of CSOs democratising IOs owes much to emancipatory processes, this view has developed a life of its own in academic debates; we know relatively little about diverse actors’ conceptual struggles over the term, or perhaps their intentional abandoning of it in favour of emancipatory alternatives (such as “global justice”). These trends imply not only a need for further studies on the respective actors who may be potentially categorised as CSOs in the “opening up” debate but also for reflexive research processes to that end. Such processes are acutely aware of their own embeddedness in academic and socio-economic power structures, cultivate suspicion of inherited assumptions and concepts, and aim at the avoidance of symbolic violence – even if this kind of behaviour and the silencing of non-academic voices cannot be avoided entirely.

Ackowledgements

We would like to thank the guest editors for the organisation of this Special Issue and all participants of the Workshop “Democracy and Practices of Global Order” at Humboldt University Berlin for thought-provoking discussions on the matter of this Special Issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The concepts of democracy, order and authority interact when transformations of order and contestations of authority are deemed democratic in scholarly discourses because they were created by CSO agents and/or further equality, for example through the inclusion of previously marginalised CSOs in IOs.

2 When scholars use the term ‘democracy’, they, as does anybody else, inevitably describe and evaluate a social phenomenon, stabilise a particular understanding thereof, further marginalise other potential meanings and democratic contestation (W.B. Gallie 1955-56), and push their position within the academic field through the contribution to complex conceptual debates.

3 For example, the accreditation of a NGO at the United Nations can be framed as a practice in itself, a process involving multiple practices (ranging from filling out forms, speaking to UN officials and similar) or as an institution routinely remade through pre-defined procedures (Pouliot and Thérien 2018, 168).

4 For example, Algerian peasants deemed the cultivation of peasant tradition an act of resistance in one situation and one of adaptation to a drastically changed sociopolitical order in another.