Organising principles for international advocacy associations

Recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of voluntary non-profit associations established to address solutions to major international social problems. Many of these associations concentrate on advocacy work, as opposed to service delivery, and are international in scope rather than based in a single country. This paper is concerned with the challenges to organising this particular type of voluntary association.While rapid progress in communications and transportation technology has undoubtedly facilitated the development of these associations, such organisations still face formidable problems. The paper argues that international advocacy associations are successful when they adopt particular organisational structures and strategies to accommodate these problems. In particular, decentralised and federated structures appear to be more viable for the international advocacy arena.This paper reviews relevant literature and elaborates on the theoretical expectations for successful structuring of international associations devoted to advocacy on global issues. Hypotheses are set forth and investigated in a preliminary way through the examination of case studies of three associations.This paper was originally prepared for the Annual Conference of the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars, London, July 1990. The author wishes to thank David Cooperrider and Bill Pasmore for their encouragement to undertake this work, the team of the Social Innovations Project in the Department of Organizational Behavior of the Weatherhead School of Management for allowing him the benefits of their field studies, and David Mason and Herman Stein for their helpful suggestions and useful insights.