Scale and Scope in 'Green' Advocacy

Abstract

Firms and environmental NGO's contest regulatory, legal and other decisions in a variety of fora including law courts, administrative tribunals and the media. Environmental advocacy in the 1990s is big business, yet its organisation has been little studied. How can NGO's with differing environmental priorities best organise their efforts? In this paper we present a simple model of NGO mergers in a multi-issue world. We identify strategic considerations that give rise to economics of scope in contest-activity when (and only when) the scale of that activity is sufficiently large. This provides a rationale for the recent trend towards not just larger but broader green pressure groups. The incentives for NGO merger are shown to be socially efficient.