Transnational Environmental Activism in Challenging Contexts: A Comparative Analysis of Transnational ENGOs in China and Turkey

Ceren Çevik

As climate change becomes one of the most pressing issues humanity is facing, the importance of transnational linkages has been increasing. While the current state of the art has produced many insights about NGO–NGO interactions in democracies, there is still much to discover when it comes to non-democracies. There is a lot of discussion on what kind of factors facilitate the relationship between NGOs, yet we do not know what kind of factors affect the possible interactions between them in contexts in which their operations are heavily monitored and regulated through a variety of institutions. This research focuses on transnational environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and their relationship with local ENGOs in such regimes. It can contribute to a better understanding of how domestic institutional structures and regulations develop and change over the years in non-democracies and how they create or destroy opportunity structures for transnational activism. Taking China and Turkey as two focus countries that share many similarities, such as political centralization and international position on climate change, the research positions itself at the intersection of social movement studies, international relations, and organizational studies and aims to make significant contributions to these fields.