accomplishments in human rights, environmental protection, and humanitarian
assistance, the book argues that IGOs could and should do more to involve NGOs
in their activities. That may require revising the IGO’s state-centric constitutions
and charters to allow NGOs of all types—national and international, northern and
southern—greater access.
But as Florini ( 2000 , 215 – 16 ) points out, the evolution of NGO–IGO interactions
has been anything but smooth. After NGOs demonstrated their growing promin-
ence through their active participation in and around the large UN conference of
the 1980 s and 1990 s, and as post-cold war euphoria set in, ECOSOC opened
intergovernmental negotiations in 1993 on expanding NGO access at the United
Nations. But many governments remained deeply uneasy about allowing a stronger
NGO role. Those that had been the targets of NGO campaigns on human
rights abuses were less than eager to reward such groups with a place at the
intergovernmental table. And many governments, especially those that were still
struggling to build eVective state institutions, saw little value in encouraging
non-governmental actors that might threaten their monopoly on decision-making.
By the mid- 1990 s, as the General Assembly was considering the question of broader
NGO access throughout the UN system, a backlash had arisen.
The interactions of speciWc NGOs with speciWc intergovernmental institutions
are part of a much larger phenomenon: The loose agglomeration of activists who
for a period around the turn of the millennium came to be known as the ‘‘anti-
globalization movement.’’ The term was always a misnomer. Few are actually
opposed to global integration per se. Most participants in the movement are
more accurately referred to as ‘‘globalization’s critics’’—people who have speciWc
objections to the consequences of certain types of economic integration, or to the
political processes by which globalization is being governed, or both. Globaliza-
tion’s critics may have come together in a loose-knit ‘‘movement,’’ but it is far from
a single coherent group. Indeed, it is so broad that many of its participants,
rejecting the ‘‘anti-globalization’’ label but unable to come up with an accurate
replacement, simply call it ‘‘the movement.’’
Toward the turn of the millennium, and particularly after the highly visible
protests at the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in
1999 , analysts began to focus on this broad phenomenon. Scholte and Schnabel
( 2002 ) brought together an unusual mixture of activists, oYcials, and researchers
to examine in depth the role of civil society in globalWnance.
O’Brien, Williams, Goetz, and Scholte ( 2000 ) examined ‘‘the relationship
between multilateral economic institutions (MEIs) and global social movements
(GSMs) as one aspect of a much wider global politics... and governance structure’’
( 2000 , 2 ). They argued that this relationship has transformed global economic
governance, moving it away from an exclusively state-centric system and leading
to signiWcant institutional modiWcation (though rather less change in
policy substance). The book examined four cases: The World Bank and women’s
684 ann florini