Why do leading advocacy organizations in transnational networks construe certain global problems, but not others, as international issues? How do certain issues rise to global prominence while other social problems fall by the wayside? The study will answer this question by collecting data on the rise and fall of issues in the transnational human rights network. First, it will capture variation in the human rights issue agenda through surveys and interviews with human rights activists, and analysis of advocacy websites. Second, it will explore reasons for this variation through a series of focus groups with activists from leading organizations in the human rights network. Participants will be asked about what is and is not on the human rights agenda; how this changes over time, and why. These data will yield insights as to how ideas move through and (sometimes) gain footholds in transnational communities of practice.
Significant numbers of Masters and Ph.D. students from the University of Pittsburgh and Carleton University will be trained to conduct interviews and focus groups, as well as in the systematic use of qualitative data analysis software and scientific methods for reaching vailid inferences about large, unstructured text datasets. This project will integrate rigorous, computer-assisted qualitatitive methods into the study of transnational networkds.
Why do some global social problems get the attention of global advocacy networks, while others go unnoticed? We explored this question by studying agenda-setting practices within the human security network, a collection of NGOs, UN agencies, governments and think-tanks concerned with increasing human well-being globally across a range of thematic areas: peace and security, development, human rights, humanitarian affairs, health and the environment. As we discovered through surveys and web analysis, the network pays much more attention to certain human security threats than others. Common issues associated with the area of "human security" include child-soldiers, poverty, and women’s rights, for example, but do not include gang violence, traffic accidents or elder-care. In fact human security specialists argue that many important human security problems are neglected or ignored. We held a series of focus groups to try to understand how practitioners set their organizational agendas and how this affects the overall issue agenda within a global network like "human security." We found that when responding to these questions in the abstract, practitioners usually stressed the broader political context, arguing that what donors, governments or the media cared about mattered more than the moral merit of specific problems. When asked to discuss specific neglected issues, however, practitioners also gave a variety of reasons why from their own perspective certain issues simply don’t belong on the human security agenda – if they are too controversial, too difficult to measure, or too much in conflict with existing concerns already championed by the network. Thus we found that the politics and structural relations within advocacy networks also matter greatly in determining the shape of the network agenda. This suggests that issue entrepreneurs keen to "sell" new ideas to powerful players in existing advocacy networks must do more than make the case for their issue's merit. They also much convince practitioners that the issue can be packaged in a way suitable for building a coalition; and that it fits the mandate of at least one set of actors within the network without detracting from policies being undertaken elsewhere in the network.
