European Union Environmental NGOs In The Perspective Of Political Opportunity Structure

With the fast development of economy and society, the environment condition is deteriorating rapidly. Consequently, the importance of environment protection is gaining more and more attention. While in that field, as the bridge that connects the public and the decision-maker, the environmental NGOs have always been playing a significant role through various working methods and effective activities. According to the academic materials available, it is found that though some resarches have been done on various study objects and some achievements do have been made, the studies on Environmental NGOs to certain extent is far from engough,especcially when we talk about the Environmental NGOs on the European Union level, since EU is highly integrated and its environment democracy is comparatively high.In view of that, the European Environmental Bureau—the biggest federation of European Environmental citizens'organizations—will be selected as a case to study under the framework of political opportunity structure in this paper. And through the analysis, it is found that in EU its open institutional structure and positive leading strategy provide EEB with great opportunities. Besides, the ongoing process of enlargement and integration of EU is also an opportunity for EEB, from whom EU benefits too. However, it should be pointed out that all the opportunities couldn't be made use of to the full without some of EEB's own characteristics.The main body of this dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part, the object EEB and its context EU are generally defined. And in the following part, the theoretical framework of political opportunity structure on EU level is raised and its two main factors: the openness of EU institutional structure and the EU leading strategy are summarized, based on which an assumption is made consequently. Subsequently, the assumption is proved to be reasonable through the case study on EEB. ie. In EU its open institutional structure and positive leading strategy provide EEB with great opportunities. While in the third part, the discussion on the complexity of EU Political opportunity structure goes further from two angles, from wich we could finally get the conclusion that besides those two main factors, the features of EEB itself and the ongoing development of EU are also kinds of opportunities that influence the development of EEB.