ABSTRACT
International relations today are hard to imagine without non-governmental organizations. As the case studies in this volume demonstrate, they are engaged at both the international as well as the regional level, mobilizing support for their various causes among policy-makers. While their presence in these multilateral institutions is far from being breaking news and would not require yet another volume, it is the consequences that follow from their engagement in international organizations that we know little about and that inspired this project. Instead of following what has been a common approach of treating NGOs as an independent variable and examining how NGOs apply their resources to instigate normative changes, we proceeded from the opposite, conceiving of NGOs as the dependent variable and investigating how variation in institutional settings affect their strategies and actions.
