During recent years, civil society legitimacy has generated a growing interest in scholarly research. The present article therefore proposes four normative criteria, namely, independence, transparency, participation, and inclusion, in order to start assessing civil society legitimacy...

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play an active and noteworthy role in governance, both at the national and international level. Three questions arise: First, how do CSOs exercise their advocacy, what repertoires, strategies and resources do they use? Second, to what degree are they...

Global environmental governance is widely regarded as suffering from process- and outcome-related shortcomings, above all problems with transparency, representation, and problem-solving capacity. These problems, whether presumed or real, have negative implications for popular legitimacy of...

The Mercosur 1995–2000 Action Program (Decision No. 09/95 of the Mercosur Common Market Council (CMC)) stated that the strengthening of the integration process required more intensive participation on the part of society. The guidelines based on that Action Program were elaborated by the...

The article outlines the options for collaboration between the European Union (EU) and the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The OGP accepts full participants (states), sub-national participants (pilot program), and observers. As of now, the OGP’s charter states that it only accepts...