Uncovering Strategic Pathways for Southeast Asian Environmental NGOs’ Participation in Climate Governance: An ISM–MICMAC Approach

Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) play an important role in promoting climate governance as Southeast Asia is highly vulnerable to climate change and has limited governance capacity. Despite the existing research, however, the factors that affect ENGO participation have been identified, but not the hierarchies between these factors, any structural dependency, or strategic implications, which could help to understand the conditions that enable effective participation. To fill this gap, this study proposes a framework of 16 important factors with a structured literature review and expert consultation and builds a matrix of factor relations on the basis of assessments made by 11 experts of various regional experiences. These different factors are used to reveal the hierarchical structure of these factors and their driving–dependence relationships by means of Interpretative Structural Modeling (ISM) and the Matrice d’Impacts Croisés-Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement (MICMAC) methods. The results show that the foundation of the structural conditions, such as institutional stability, resource predictability, organizational governance, and capacity allocation, is the most important factor in ENGO participation, and the strategic actions of social trust, network embedding, advocacy and accountability only work when these foundation conditions are met. Based on these results, four successive strategic pathways are suggested to enhance ENGO involvement in climate governance: institutional embedding, capability assetization, network embedding, and accountability and initiative upgrading. Theoretically, the study contributes to the field of climate governance research as a demonstration of a hierarchical process of structural preconditions for ENGO participation, not just strategic actions. In the practical sense, the evidence generated contributes to the formulation of policy and design of governance and participation strategies at ASEAN and at the national level by NGOs and other environmental groups. The results are based on expert knowledge used to build the ISM–MICMAC matrix and represent only a structural reflection of the relationships between the factors and not a causal relationship.