Scaling the Summit: but is there more to Global Civil Society - Intergovernmental Organisation engagement?

This thesis explores the current nature of the relationship between global civil society and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), focusing particularly on the role of summit events and technology. Civil society has become increasingly important since the 1990s and is credited with advancing global agendas on many fronts, including human rights, health, and climate change. The influence of civil society on global institutions has become more established through formal engagement processes. However, questions remain as to how sustainable such engagement is and how susceptible to political or institutional change. The research coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced changes to the conduct of international diplomacy and helped reveal important trends in how civil society operates at the global level.

Using participant observation of the summit event of the Open Government Partnership, an intergovernmental body which by design fully incorporates dialogue with civil society, and interviews with actors from civil society, government and IGO perspectives, the research offers a rich analysis of civil society-governmental interactions and relationships. It finds that global civil society has evolved significantly. In a marked departure from academic findings of the 2010s, it is no longer dominated by relatively few international non-governmental organisations, and technology has enabled it to become flatter in structure, with more opportunities for national or local actors to break through into international conversations. Summit events are no longer seen as critical one-off opportunities to impact decision-making, but rather serve as just one type of focus within year-round engagement. Nevertheless, global gatherings remain important for movement-building and the human dimension to international relations between governmental and civil society actors is likely to become more poignant as much routine engagement shifts online. The thesis offers an analysis of the different purposes of summit events which moves beyond the classic influencing/decision-making focus to encompass networking, learning and inspiring.