The European Women's Lobby: How do national feminist NGOs adapt their strategies and repertoires of actions to participate to the European Civil Society?

Lafon, Claire
(2016) ACESS EUROPE WORKSHOP “Civil society organizations beyond Brussels” — Location: Amsterdam (7.April.2016)

Files

No attached file found for this publication.

Details

Authors
  • Lafon, ClaireUSL-B
    Author
Abstract
This paper will focus on the Europeanization process – the ways national NGOs adapt their practices, strategies and organisation to EU opportunities and expectations. – through the case study of the European Women Lobby (EWL). Founded in 1990 in Brussels because the European Commission was eager to address the EU democratic deficit by funding public interest groups, EWL has become the largest umbrella organisation of women’s associations in the European Union. By a bottom-up participation and decision-making, the Brussels’ EWL staff represents the interests of 2700 NGOs members through national coordinating organizations in 31 countries. The paper will show how these EWL NGOS members use UE participatory channels such as the EU citizen’s initiatives and the Commission questions to experts to strengthen their influence at both European and national levels. To do so, we will focus on a comparative analysis of data collected during two internships within two EWL coordinations organizations: the French Coordination of the European Women Lobby (CLEF) in Paris and the French-speaking Belgium Council of Women in Brussels. These internships led to semi-structured interviews and the study of EWL internal documents such as position papers, mails, letters or reports on General Assemblies, allowing us to list the changes and difficulties the national members encountered to adapt to the European technocracy. Firstly, the paper will show how the EWL creation itself represented a will to construct a European Civil Society and a great change in the national NGOs construction and strategies. Then, the paper will focus on the impacts of EU on EWL members’ repertoires of actions through concrete examples. For instance, we will analyze the EWL recent coordinated campaigns and “week of actions” on violence and abortion, the citizen’s initiative proposed by the French EWL coordination to go against the “One of us” pro-life initiative, the benchmarking of national goo practices and good students, or the actresses’ discourse on how difficult the “European socialization” is for the NGOs volunteer members.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Lafon, C. (2016). The European Women’s Lobby: How do national feminist NGOs adapt their strategies and repertoires of actions to participate to the European Civil Society? Journal of Contemporary European Research, NaN (NaN). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/177109 (Original work published 2016)