ENGO POLICY INFLUENCE VIA LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEES IN CANADA, THE UNITED STATES, AND RUSSIA

Abstract

Within the under-populated realm of scholarship on legislative committees, there have been numerous studies which have looked at the ability of legislative committees to achieve policy influence in the wider legislature. However, fewer have examined the ability for non-governmental organizations – particularly those with relative outsider status in the policymaking process – to influence the policy recommendations of committee members. As environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) have often worked through legislative committees to try to influence policy, this dissertation examines how the characteristics of different legislative institutions work to facilitate or limit influence by representatives of ENGOs. This is done by comparing the interactions of ENGOs with legislative committees in Canada, the United States, and Russia – countries which respectively have parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential systems, and hold in common the derivation of a large portion of the country’s GDP from natural resource-based industries. The central research question for this study asks how the institutional organization of legislative committees affects the ability of ENGOs to achieve influence through engaging the committees, and how other factors interact with this to increase or decrease the potential for ENGO influence. A key finding that emerges out of this line of inquiry is that there is evidence that some conditions for influence in committees cannot be seen as extensions of the wider legislature but can rightly be seen as unique to the committees themselves or as manifesting in unique ways within them.