ABSTRACT
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century the engagement of civil society actors has gained normality in everyday European and global governance processes. At the global level non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and advocacy networks, as the most important representatives of what has become called civil society organizations, entered centre stage of transnational relations, particularly since the world conferences of the United Nations (UN) of the 1990s (among many others Keck and Sikkink 1998; Martens 2002; Risse 2001). At the European level the inclusion of civil society organizations in European policy processes also increased at that time, a development that was widely supported by European institutions (Saurugger 2006; Smismans 2005) in the wake of the European Union’s (EU) governance turn (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006; Smismans 2006a).
