Explaining the Advocacy Agenda: Insights from the Human Security Network

Abstract

Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific candidate issues. Scholars of global agenda setting should pay particular attention to how intranetwork relations structure gatekeeper preferences within transnational advocacy spaces because these help constitute perceptions of issues' and actors' attributes in networks.Why do organizations at the center of transnational advocacy networks select particular issues for attention but not others? This is an important question because advocacy matters in developing new global norms and focusing political attention on global social problems. Yet the advocacy agenda varies, and we know little about how actors in these networks determine which norms to promote in the first place. We build on recent research showing that the decisions of advocacy organizations at the center of issue networks are crucial for agenda setting and investigate the determinants of these advocacy "gatekeeper" preferences by studying agenda setting in the area of human security, broadly defined.We first captured variation in the salience of human security issues and mapped the network of human security organizations through surveys with practitioners and content analysis of organizational websites. Second, we identified a population of issues that practitioners in this network believe should be on the human security

The Arc of Complex Global Governance: From Organization to Coalition

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Nichtstaatliche Akteure in der Menschenrechtspolitik: von Normanwälten über Komplizen zu Infragestellern und Herausforderern

“…So wurde bislang nur unzureichend analysiert, aufgrund welcher Charakteristika von NGO-NGO Konstellationen, sich ihre Interessen in einem solchen Netzwerk gegenüber anderen NSA durchsetzen (Spiro 2012). Ebenso müsste der Aushandlungsprozess innerhalb der Netzwerke über die Themen, die auf die internationale Agenda gebracht werden sollen, noch viel stärker in den Blick genommen werden (für eine Ausnahme siehe : Carpenter 2007;Carpenter et al 2014).…”

World Society and the Global Foreign Aid Network

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