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...