Introduction

International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an integral part of global governance and global world order(s). They have played an important role in the development of norms and are by now crucial players in setting agendas and standards as well as with respect to monitoring of policy issues ranging from climate change to trade and human rights (Peters et al, 2009). They have instigated and shaped international institutions such as the International Criminal Court (Pearson, 2006; Haddad, 2013), and the provision of humanitarian or development aid is meanwhile inconceivable without NGOs. In order for such activities to be successful, NGOs often engage in inter-organizational cooperation, defined as the interaction between two or more organizations with respect to information sharing, the coordination of policies, joint decision-making and other activities (Biermann and Koops, 2017). While NGO scholars have begun to inventory and characterize the types of relationship that NGOs enter into, and have studied inter-organizational cooperation regarding its form and function (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Henry et al, 2004; Yanacopulos, 2005; Carpenter, 2007a, 2011; Ohanyan, 2012; Elbers and Schulpen, 2013; Stroup and Wong, 2013), the inner workings of such cooperation remain largely unexplored.

Therefore, we still have only scant knowledge, particularly of the processes involved and as to who instigates cooperation among NGOs and moves the involved organizations from non-cooperation to informal or formal cooperation as, for example, in the case of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). Starting out as a ‘loosely organized coalition of NGOs, it […] transformed into a permanent institution at the court with two headquarters, regional offices, and a secretariat with a permanent staff’ (Haddad, 2013: 189; see also Pearson, 2006). While constitutive of the existing world order with respect to human rights, we know little about how the Court's transformation came about, who were the driving forces behind it, and what prompted NGOs to move from informal to formal cooperation. The same applies to the Climate Action Network (CAN), a large coalition of NGOs that has existed since 1989, and of which Duwe (2001: 182) argues that individual agents ‘act as entry points for the cooperation’ among the partaking NGOs.