Change through Advocacy in International Organizations

Abstract The three advocacy strategies for promoting change in international organizations are social pressure, persuasion, and ‘authority talk’. Advocacy success depends on the presence of strategy-specific favourable conditions related to characteristics of advocates, targets, issues, and context. For example, social pressure needs a public forum—or a credible threat of exposure—to be effective, yet persuasion works best in an insulated and private setting. Social pressure succeeds if a large coalition applies it, while ‘authority talk’ is more effective when the advocate is a single source of information. Social vulnerability makes targets susceptible to social pressure but not ‘authority talk’. Issue salience can be an impediment to ‘authority talk’ but not persuasion. As issues move gradually from emergence to full institutionalization—a process that requires continued campaigning by the original advocates or support from new champions—they become embedded in intergovernmental bodies’ debates and documents, budgets, policy and guidance, training, structures, evaluation metrics, and accountability frameworks. Contestation can either aid or hinder institutionalization. The advocacy-focused framework has advantages over its analytical rivals. It has no preconceptions about the behaviour of member states, international bureaucrats, or experts. It does not assume that new challenges or crises automatically lead to transformations. It maintains that a precedent is not enough to set an organization on a new path. It does not equate the presence of advocates with advocacy success. Instead, it explains how advocacy strategies succeed or fail depending on constellations of strategy-specific conditions.