This presentation explores the characteristics of the envisioned networks of a Brussels-based NGO involved in shaping European education policy, and it contributes to the literature on interest groups active at the European level.

Interest groups contribute to public policy shaping and decision-making within and across political domains at national and European levels (Bevir & Phillips, 2019). Hence, “the organisation, aggregation, articulation, and intermediation of societal interests that seek to shape public policies” (Beyers, Eising & Maloney, 2008, p. 1103) has received increased attention in European studies.

Depending on normative frameworks and scholarly interests, different terms depict interest groups, especially non-state actors, across studies (Schoenefels, 2021). Interest groups interacting with EU institutions are “generally considered legitimate elements of EU governance” (Schoenefels, 2021, p. 586) and shall be listed in a Transparency Register. These encompass all organisational structures that mediate between public authorities and citizens through a democratic process to serve a general interest, like NGOs. NGOs specialise in a narrow policy domain or issue around which they can network and gather information (Costa & Müller, 2019), act as intermediary organisations (Ainsworth & Sened, 1993), and are perceived as independent “defenders of public interests” (Grant, 2001, p. 338, cited in Beyers et al., 2008). 

Since the start of the European integration process (1950s-1960s), interest groups have grown exponentially in Brussels, with a growing number of NGOs (Eising & Kohler-Koch, 2005). Expanding EU governance into new policy areas has stimulated the mobilisation of a more diverse set of interests. Accordingly, the potential for NGOs to influence decision-makers and policy outcomes in the EU has increased since the 2010s and with the establishment of the European Semester (Costa & Müller, 2019). 

Compared to other interest groups (e.g. business), NGOs may have more difficulties in mobilising and gaining access to EU policymaking (Dür & Matteo, 2016). However, they are well-represented in closed-access procedures involving the establishment of bodies within EU institutions and agencies gathering a limited number of stakeholders over a relatively long period – like European Commission expert groups and advisory committees (Arras & Beyers, 2020). Particularly, NGOs based in Brussels that are European or international in scope have privileged access to permanent European Commission expert groups (Rasmussen & Gross, 2015). 

According to the EU Transparency Register, in April 2023, there were 4,439 registered NGOs, networks and similar entities, of which 1,453 represented interests in education to some extent, and 393 had their headquarters in Belgium – typically in Brussels. Some of these NGOs surfaced in our previous analyses of European education network governance (Milana, Klatt, & Tronca, 2020) and on political mobilisation and agenda-setting in European adult learning (Milana, Mikeluc, 2023). Yet, dedicated attention to NGOs contributing to policy-shaping in European education is still spare. 

This study focuses on NGO1, a unique Brussels-based organisation representing a broad interest in education. Established upon the initiative of a few European networks and Brussels-based NGOs, in 2023 it comprised over 40 associate members, not-for-profit legal entities that are either European networks or federations of organisations from more than one country, half of whom have headquarters in Brussels. 

We adopted a structural interactionist approach (Tronca & Forsé, 2022) to understand how the actors involved in NGO1’s networks interacted, determining its network governance (Jones, Hesterly & Borgatti 1997). 

Information was self-reported by NGO1 and collected through two surveys, enabling a Whole and a Personal Network Analysis (two types of Social Network Analysis), respectively. The first survey gathered data on the intra-organisational network of relations among NGO1’s members through two questions aimed at capturing, over the period 2019-2023, the presence of any collaborative activities (e.g., participation in working groups, writing of joint documents) among each pair of NGO1’s members. The second survey collected data on the inter-organisational network of relations held by an NGO behind its constituency through two more questions related to the same period: the first, a name generator, enabled the seizing of collaborative activities between NGO1 and any other organisation (including but not limited to its member organisations); the second, a name interrelator, enabled the identification of collaborations between each pair of the mentioned organisations. Both surveys were presented in person to staff from NGO1’s secretariat on 19 May 2023, and responses were returned by email on 24 June 2023. As with any self-reported information, there were limits to the data. Not all activities that occurred among its members may be known to NGO1’s secretariat. However, those known to NGO1’s secretariat can be considered the most visible in the Brussels bubble and constitute NGO1's perception of the structural dimension proper to its relational reality. Thanks to an exploratory analysis of NGO1’s intra-organisational and inter-organisational networks it was possible to investigate the overall social cohesion of each of these networks, the centrality of single organisations, and the presence of highly cohesive subgroups. As measures, we used ‘density’ to determine the level of social cohesion, the two connectivity measures of ‘local centrality’ (i.e., Degree and its normalised measure) and ‘global centrality’ (i.e., Betweenness and its normalised version, Freeman 1979) with their relative levels of centralisation (Ibid.), and the ‘cliques’ or indicators for highly cohesive subgroups (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). For each network (intra-organisational, inter-organisational), we started from a 1-mode matrix. The intra-organisational network included 42 member organisations (or nodes) while the inter-organisational network included 96 organisations (or nodes). For each network (intra-organisational, inter-organisational), we started from a 1-mode matrix. The intra-organisational network included 42 member organisations (or nodes). The inter-organisational network included 96 organisations. For each 1-mode matrix, one symmetric and binary matrix was obtained and used to produce one simple graph for each network. We used the Ucinet 6 software (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002) to perform the analyses and the NetDraw software (Borgatti, 2002) to obtain the graphs.

This study's two types of Social Network Analysis (Whole and Personal Network Analysis) yielded a rather clear picture of NGO1’s network governance and collaborative networks. At the intra-organizational level, graph density is quite high, as it is 0.741, and it emerges that in the most relevant structural area of governance, only one-third of the actors are part of the NGO1’s board. A relevant number of cliques emerges, as many as 157, and a set of nodes (NGO1’s members) with great capacity to belong to multiple cliques. It is then noted that in a structural context where hierarchical phenomena are highly unlikely due to its high density: (i) there are nonetheless two particularly relevant actors, compared to all others, to the structural dimension of NGO1's governance; (ii) these two actors are not part of NGO1’s board. At the inter-organisational level, it emerges that the density of the simple graph is 0.216. This low-density level coincides with a high-level centralisation of the simple graph: for degree centrality: graph centralisation (as proportion, not percentage) = 0.801; for betweenness centrality: network centralisation index = 18.95%. This means it is a substantially hierarchised network, and analysing the organisations’ centrality level is extremely important. The analysis of the local and global levels of centrality of individual nodes brings to light different levels of node centrality, from the analysis of which it is observed, overall, that in particular three nodes that are European bodies tend to be very central. In sum: (i) while network governance, emerging from NGO1's intra-organisational network, is connected to a dense structure, within the network there are actors capable of playing a structural coordinating role; (ii) NGO1’s network of inter-organisational collaborations also appears, to some extent, characterised by a phenomenon of structural coordination, strongly connected to some specific attributive characteristics of the nodes.

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