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The Strengths and Limits of the NGO Women's Movement Model: Shaping Nicaragua's Democratic Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Christina Ewig
Christina Ewig*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Abstract

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This article examines the political interactions in Nicaragua between the NGO-based feminist movement and government institutions on the issue of women's health in the mid-1990s. Analysis of the Nicaraguan feminist movement yields insight into the ability of NGO-based movements to influence state policy and into the strengths and limits of using NGOs as an institutional base on which to build a social movement. By defining the mechanisms of state-NGO interactions and analyzing the democratic potential of an NGO-based social movement, this article contributes to understanding of both NGOs and social movements in the context of newly democratic governments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , 1999 , pp. 75 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the Tinker Foundation and the Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for partial financial support for this research. A previous version of this article was presented to the American Political Science Association, 28-31 August 1997, in Washington, D.C. For helpful comments on that paper, I would like to thank Karen Kampwirth. I would also like to thank Jonathan Hartlyn and Evelyne Huber for their suggestions on prior drafts of this study and the three anonymous LARR reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

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