Book Review: The New Climate Activism: NGO Authority and Participation in Climate Change Governance
| Author | Devon Cantwell-Chavez |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020221123938 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Clearly the motivation for the report and the published book was to provide and
publicize policy options for President Macron in a way that was sensitive to the feelings
of the Algerian government and citizenry but also to those of the French Right, many of
whose members are of pied noir origin, while serving as a workable blueprint for
reconciliation. Despite Stora’s efforts at evenhandedness, his report and book have been
criticized in Algeria as well as in France in ways that evoke Aesop’s advice, “If you try
to please all, you please no one.”
Jen Iris Allan
The New Climate Activism: NGO Authority and Participation in Climate Change Governance.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 384 pp. $32.95 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-4875-2584-2
Reviewed by: Devon Cantwell-Chavez (devon.cantwell@uottawa.ca), University of Ottawa
DOI: 10.1177/00207020221123938
As a complex system and institutional arena, the climate change regime has, for many
decades, challenged International Relations (IR) scholars to expand their analysis
beyond the level of the state. In The New Climate Activism: NGO Authority and
Participation in Climate Change Governance, Jen Iris Allan explores the phenomenon
of non-expert NGOs (non-governmental organizations) shifting their advocacy to be
seen as experts in international climate change governance. Allan offers a novel theory
of how this process occurs and demonstrates this theory in action with studies of five
NGO networks (labour, women’s rights, climate justice, health, and human rights) that
attempted to expand into the climate regime.
Allan opens the book by explaining the concept she calls “forum multiplying,”
wherein NGOs expand their presence into additional forums to advance their causes
(6). She explains that the process of forum multiplying includes three critical steps: (1)
identifying a new regime; (2) gaining entry into the regime; (3) and mobilizing within to
have their contributions included (25). She subsequently argues that NGOs are mo-
tivated by political, normative, or material/financial circumstances to seek forum
multiplying, though she explains that the political and normative motivations for this
are the “dominant currency”over material factors.
One of the more interesting arguments that Allan makes is that funding matters far
less than other experts may assume in the phenomenon of forum multiplying. While she
acknowledges that finance plays a role in these relationships and dynamics of joining
the regime, she argues that funding cannot overcome other motivation factors necessary
for successful forum multiplication. This is a potentially challenging finding for those
384 International Journal 77(2)
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