By Yi Kou
Summary: The world society, of which INGOs are key carriers, is often credited with contributing to the diffusion of liberal world culture. This master’s thesis explores the discrepant effects of environmental INGOs in the diffusion of global environmentalist culture across countries with different levels of development.
Examining the conditions under which environmental concerns arise and gain significance is a prominent subject in comparative social research. Environmental issues hold a central position in global governance. Problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, unsustainable management of water resources, and the health impacts of pollution and hazardous chemicals have long become global challenges and the urgency of addressing these problems demands international efforts (OECD, 2008). Despite an overall increase in environmental awareness across the world over the past decades (GlobeScan, 2021), discrepancies remain both within countries and between countries with different levels of development.
At the national level, world society theory highlights the top-down diffusion of cultural script. The historically formed international structure such as treaties, inter- and non-governmental organizations, laws, and ministries serves as the promoter of also historically formed global culture models, and by institutionalizing them, essentially amplifies and perpetuates their influence on other social actors. The now dominant liberal world culture underlying global institutions, with rationalization, universalism, belief in progress, and individualism as some of its key elements (Boli & Thomas, 1999), has been found incorporated in national policies, practices, public attitudes and behaviors across various domains, including but not limited to development, human rights, education, and environment (Hironaka, 2014; Meyer et al., 1992; Wotipka & Tsutsui, 2008). However, in environmentalism as well as in several other issue areas, contestation around the liberal script has grown fierce in the last decade (Velasco, 2023).
One of the major theoretical deficiencies of previous world society studies on environmental awareness lies in the lack of distinction between the Global South and the Global North. Global North is recognized as the birthplace of environmentalism, and most international organizations originated and are still located in the Global North. Environmentalism was seen as a cultural script spread by Northern environmental organizations to the Global South through their activities in the Global South. The failure to identify the predicaments Northern environmental INGOs face in the Global South arguably leads to inconsistent findings in the few cross-national quantitative studies so far.
On the other hand, previous studies primarily treat INGOs as a constitutive part and embodiment of world culture, largely a homogeneous extension. While it correctly emphasizes the content that INGOs promote, it obscures the organizational features and mechanisms that determine the effectiveness of INGOs in disseminating these cultures. Especially in the area of environmentalism, ample case studies find resistance to environmentalism in the Global South (Rootes, 2006), but we do not know whether this is resulted from the misinterpretation of global culture in the Global South or from the failure of INGOs, one of the main mechanisms for the transmission of global culture, in the Global South. This remains to be addressed by cross-national quantitative studies.
In my master’s thesis in the program Sociology – European Societies at FU Berlin, I set off to identify and disentangle the uneven effect of environmental INGOs in countries with different levels of development. I use individual-level data from the 6th wave of World Value Survey (WVS) (Inglehart et al., 2018). The explained variables cover different dimensions of environmental attitudes and behaviors. For the key explanatory variable, countries’ environmental INGO density, I refer to the Transnational Social Movement Organizations Dataset (TSMOD) (Smith et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2019) which provides cleaned data based on the information from The Yearbook of International Organizations.
In the first part of empirical analysis, I examined the influence of environmental INGO in Global South and Global North countries separately. Across all five environmental awareness indicators, respondents from Global North countries show higher awareness as the INGO activities in their countries increase. The opposite trend is true in Global South countries. While INGO activities don’t have significant influences on environmental actions, they do lead to a loss of confidence in environmental organizations and attitudinal backlashes against the controversial environment priority agendas they promote.
Next, following the theoretical assumption of a distinction between world culture and world culture carriers, I introduced the measurement of world citizen identification, a concept signaling spontaneous recognition and adoption of world culture and values. The measure of this concept stands for an individual-level bottom-up mechanism as conceptually contrary to and independent of the world society’s top-down influence. It taps directly into the liberal world culture and values individuals possess. The analysis shows world citizen identification to be positively correlated with environment awareness across all countries in all attitudinal and actional dimensions. This indicates that the decoupling between world society activity and local environmental awareness observed in Global South happens not as a result of failed world culture but as a result of world culture failing to diffuse via the INGO channel.
Figure 1 Influence of key factors on environmental attitudes
Coefficients shown here are odds ratios of respondents displaying corresponding pro-environmental attitudes and actions. Logistic regressions with country cluster-robust standard errors are applied. 95%-confidence intervals. Priority: protecting the environment vs. economic growth. Portrait: looking after the environment is important to me. Confidence: confidence in environmental organizations. Membership: membership in environmental organizations. Donation: given money to an ecological organization during the past two years.
Subsequent analysis of interaction effects finds that environmental INGOs are most effective in fostering environmental awareness among those with low world citizen identification. This further confirms environmentalism as a key element entailed in world culture and the positive impact of INGOs in diffusing environmentalism in the Global North. In further discussions, I expanded on the current literature and discussed the institutional features and performance of environmental INGOs which presumably would account for their negative effect on environmental awareness in the Global South.
In conclusion, my study reveals the difficulties world society encounters in disseminating liberal script in the new front of environmentalism. It devises conceptual and methodological tools for disentangling the actual impact of institution operation from the impact of its represented culture. Future research could benefit from more direct meso-level measures to determine the circumstances under which the legitimacy of organizational goals and the effectiveness of organizational practices, respectively, influence public perceptions of environmental organizations and public support for the environmentalist agenda they promote.
Literature
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GlobeScan. (2021). Report: Despite Record Levels of Environmental Concern Across the World, Large Gap Remains between Aspiration and Action When it Comes to Sustainable Living. Retrieved from https://globescan.com/2021/10/25/despite-record-levels-environmental-concerns-large-gap-remains-between-aspiration-and-action-sustainable-living/
Hironaka, A. (2014). Greening the Globe: World Society and Environmental Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Smith, J., Wiest, D., Hughes, M. M., Plummer, S., & Duncan, B. (2019). Transnational Social Movement Organizations Dataset (TSMOD), 1953-2013. Retrieved from: DOI: 10.7910/DVN/NRUBSV
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Velasco, K. (2023). Transnational Backlash and the Deinstitutionalization of Liberal Norms: LGBT+ Rights in a Contested World. American Journal of Sociology, 128(5), 1381-1429. doi:10.1086/724724
Wotipka, C. M., & Tsutsui, K. (2008). Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–2011. Sociological Forum, 23(4), 724-754. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2008.00092.x