Lobbying Governments or Corporations? A Comparative Case Study of Old and New Tactics to Improve Factory Farming in the Netherlands.

Abstract

While there is an abundance of studies that either examines the tactics of NGOs versus governments or vis à vis corporations, there is relatively little work that examines under what conditions they either choose to lobby governments or target corporations. Rather than seeing political and corporate 'venues' as distinct and unconnected lobbying routes, this paper seeks to highlight the strategic choices NGOs have to make when addressing regulatory issues affecting the market. In answering these questions I combine insights on the way opportunity structures affect the action repertoire of social movements with the analytical perspectives offered by the governance literature. I argue that the key to evaluating these choices lies in a differential assessment of the governance capacity of the state versus the market. The perceived governance capacity of the state vis à vis the market is an important determinant of the opportunity structures NGOs face. Along with other factors such as an organization's resources and identity, it is this assessment that helps explains a movements choice of its target. Through a comparative case study of the campaigns of two different organizations that challenged factory farming I show how the one group deliberately argued in favor of holding the Dutch government responsible for making the necessary regulatory changes, while the other group's assessment of the regulatory constellation led to the precisely the opposite conclusion of seeing the market as the most effective agent of change in improving factory farming. I conclude that such different assessments are a direct result of the complexity of modern food governance, and that this complexity may also explain the resilience of both targets to in fact yield to the demands of these two groups.

Keywords: Social movements, Opportunity structures, the Netherlands, Factory farming, Food governance, Case studies, Private certification