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Arkansas Law Review

Keywords

private environmental governance, nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, private regulation

Abstract

Although it had been mentioned in other disciplines, the term “private environmental governance” entered the legal literature in 2007. In the first paragraph of the article that imported the term, Professor Michael Vandenbergh wrote, “Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), rather than lobbying national and international governmental bodies to generate public requirements, are using consumer pressure to demand that corporations engage in . . . private regulation.” Thus, from its very beginning, the legal scholarship on private environmental governance has explicitly acknowledged the role of NGOs. As the study of private environmental governance has grown in volume, sophistication, and recognition, the role of NGOs has remained explicit but has not developed far beyond the mere recognition of their importance. By developing and applying a framework for assessment of NGO activity and rhetoric, this article aims to start a more vigorous consideration of the role of NGOs in private environmental governance.

This article presents a framework for assessing NGO efforts and will apply that framework to a diverse set of prominent environmental NGOs in order to demonstrate its value.  Section II will explore the literature on private environmental governance to uncover the way scholars have so far considered the role of NGOs. Section III will detail the NGO assessment framework that this article proposes. Section IV will explain the methods for data gathering and analysis. Section V will present the findings of the framework as applied to a small set of diverse environmental NGOs. Section VI offers concluding thoughts on the important role of NGOs in private environmental governance.

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