ABSTRACT
Quite soon after I entered the IFF arena, it became apparent to me that NGOs seemed to operate as what I later came to call “issue raisers.” Amidst the dry government interventions filled with “UN-ese” that meant very little to me as a novice, many NGO interventions seemed to cut through the jargon and bring up issues that I felt I understood something about. Particularly during the early days of meetings, NGO interventions tended to be less oriented toward specific textual changes and more towards larger, overarching issues. As I mentioned in previous chapters, NGOs were critiqued for this strategy from time to time, and often criticized each other, in that they felt that if they weren't able to address specific segments of the texts that were being dealt with in a specific working group or plenary, then they wouldn't be able to adequately influence the outcome of the process. However, they also seemed to be expected, at points, to play the role of the issue raisers—those involved in the process who reminded governments and other delegates about the “larger” issues at stake in forest policy making, rather than simply the language debates taking place over particular pieces of text.
