ABSTRACT
The international nature of many environmental problems calls for both regional and global cooperation. As many nation-states are, by themselves, inadequately prepared to deal with transboundary environmental problems,2 the potential solutions lie not only with multinational governmental treaties, but also in the emergence of a transboundary civil society, particularly through non-governmental organizations (NGOs).3 Scholarly work has highlighted the role of elite international environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace, WWF, and Friends of the Earth, who have played a huge role in global environmental politics and networks.4 Yet often such research has paid insufficient attention to the agency of local NGOs in this global activist structure. Studies on transnational social movement organizations have noted the growing role of transnational local people’s movements.5 However, most of these studies selected cases in which local NGOs were actively seeking and/or successfully integrated into the transnational movement network, possibly leading to the underestimation of the difficulties entailed in forming and maintaining cross-boundary cooperative ties. The cases studied in this paper demonstrate that despite the transnational nature of many environmental problems, Chinese and Russian NGOs are still largely confined within national boundaries.
