Coming full circle: Differential empowerment in the EU accession process

The EU accession process brings a profound transformation not only to candidate countries’ institutions and policies, but also to the political opportunity structure in place, creating new possibilities for previously marginalised actors. Studying the differential empowerment of NGOs throughout the Croatian accession process, this paper makes two related claims: first, differential empowerment depends crucially on domestic actors’ awareness for and ability to use new opportunities to their advantage. Second, an overreliance on EU leverage poses important temporal and substantive limits on NGO empowerment and leads to a rapid decline of their relevance in the post-accession phase. I argue that a more sustainable shift in the domestic power balance would require both the EU and domestic civil society actors to place more emphasis on fostering improved practices of civil society inclusion in domestic policymaking settings throughout the accession process