ABSTRACT
International institutional contexts which provide access to NGOs also exert influence on the strategies and frames NGOs employ, as Locher and Joachim argue in this volume. One example is access afforded by the EU in the form of support for the formation of “platforms” or EU-level coalitions of NGOs working on social policy issues. As a context for interest groups, the EU has been characterized as a distinctive brand of neo-pluralism, understaffed for its policy reach, deficient in representative democracy, and, as a consequence, dependent on interest groups and NGOs for both generating expertise as well as legitimacy by acting as conduits to European publics (see Greenwood, Chapter 7 in this volume). This chapter examines how the EU institutional context for social policy influences the strategies of the EU-level social NGO community.
