The Broken Promise of Global Advocacy Inequality in Global Interest Representation

The Broken Promise of Global Advocacy addresses two key normative debates associated with the rise of transnational advocacy: whether global interest communities are biased in favor of wealthier countries; and whether the growth of global advocacy implies the emergence of a global civil society truly representative of global constituencies.

The authors address these important debates using original data drawn from a large-scale project which maps all organized interests participating in two international venues: the World Trade Organizations Ministerial Conferences (1995–2017) and the United Nations Climate Summits (1997–2017). They leverage this unique dataset to carry out a systematic empirical assessment of contending views on the factors driving the rise of transnational advocacy. In doing so, the book demonstrates that cross-national differences in global interest representation largely mirror states’ economic power, and that global interest communities are likely to remain dominated by organizations representing national—rather than global—interests.