Organizational ecology has attracted growing interest in global governance research in recent years. As a structural theory, however, organizational ecology has overlooked how organizations may shape the organizational environment by their own choices. Bridging the insights of organizational ecology and the study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I argue that the organizational choice of specialism (as opposed to generalism) increases the power of NGOs to influence an environmental condition—issue salience—by targeting a small but engaged segment of the public. Focusing on wildlife conservation governance, I collected new comprehensive data on NGOs and issue characteristics (2008–2015). My empirical analysis shows that specialist NGO density is strongly associated with issue salience. I further examined causal processes in the case of pangolin conservation advocacy, in which specialist NGOs first raised issue salience and generalist NGOs followed. The findings suggest a division of labor among NGOs and challenge a conventional view that the power of NGOs is concentrated in a small number of prominent organizations.

中文翻译：

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专业化的力量：非政府组织在全球保护治理中的倡导

近年来，组织生态学在全球治理研究中引起了越来越多的兴趣。然而，作为一种结构理论，组织生态学忽视了组织如何通过自己的选择来塑造组织环境。结合组织生态学的见解和非政府组织 (NGO) 的研究，我认为组织选择专业性（而不是通才）增加了 NGO 影响环境条件的能力——问题的显着性——通过瞄准一个小但参与的部分公众。围绕野生动物保护治理，我收集了关于非政府组织和问题特征的新的综合数据（2008-2015）。我的实证分析表明，专业非政府组织的密度与问题的显着性密切相关。我进一步研究了穿山甲保护倡导案例中的因果过程，其中专业的非政府组织首先提出问题的突出性，然后是通才的非政府组织。调查结果表明非政府组织之间存在分工，并挑战了传统观点，即非政府组织的权力集中在少数知名组织中。