An
unbelievable amount of lobbying in Brussels is done through associations and
umbrella organisations. These vary from your typical industry associations to
the European Youth Council. But how effective are they and is it worth spending
money (in the form of membership fee) and energy (you have to attend meetings
and give input) or should you simply “ do it yourself”.
Strength
through numbers
In my
opinion there are certainly some excellent associations and umbrella
organisations operating in Brussels. Amongst them I would name COPA-COGECA
(representing the European farmers) and BusinessEurope. The European Commission
isn’t able to talk with each and every stakeholder when drawing up legislation
or policy, so it is better to talk to the representatives from the field, which
in turn represent thousands, sometimes millions of persons. Moreover, the
aforementioned organizations also have a lot of in-house expertise and
organizational capacity so the European institutions can rely on them for input
and to create legitimacy Europe wide for policy. Paying for membership of these
kind of organizations is worth every penny, and moreover it is also wise to
monitor internal developments so you can steer the positions and activities of
such “ giants”.
The
draw-backs
There are
however a couple of draw-backs of having your interest represented by umbrella organizations.
You should be aware that such umbrella organizations sometimes represent very
diverse interest. Consumer umbrella organizations for example have to juggle
between the interests of consumers wanting more ease when buying online versus
consumers which value privacy more, and thus would like to see barriers to
information gathering on the internet. Sometimes these internal conflicts of
interest are unbridgeable. What then often happens is that there is a consensus
to “agree to disagree” or even worse, the biggest interest within the umbrella
organization wins it from the smaller factions. This sometimes has as a
perverted result that the umbrella organization to whome you pay a fee to
represent your interest becomes a way to block your lobby. You should be aware
that this happens in Brussels with some frequency and that from the moment you
realize this is happening, you should abort any plans of lobbying through the
umbrella association.
The second
draw-backs of lobbying though umbrella organizations is that they tend to be a
bit slow and sluggish when it comes to reacting to new policy developments.
This is because construing official positions requires both internal
administrative as well as political agreement. It has happened that umbrella
organization were not able to react on time to fast developing policies.
Concluding
remarks
Yes,
associations and umbrella organisations DO matter in Brussels. They are often
the official spokesperson for industry and civil society towards the
institutions. Some Members of Parliaments refuse to talk to smaller actors,
opting to talk only to the big organisations that represent them. However, bear
in mind that umbrella organisations and associations can sometimes be very slow
to react to policy developments, and are sometimes even a blocking power
because of internal bickering. if you have the feeling this is the case, dont ever hesitate to start your own lobby.
