What happened to non-governmental organizations' participation at the COP-15 round of climate negotiations in Copenhagen? Although the climate regime has been seen as relatively open to civil society, everything changed in Copenhagen and civil society became increasingly disenfranchised. This article discusses the three main forces that led to civil society's disenfranchisement at this round of the climate negotiations: increased registration, poor planning by the Danish organizers and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the merging of movements. I conclude by discussing implications of the increase in civil society disenfranchisement to the climate regime and to the study of global environmental politics more broadly.

This paper explores the ways in which civil society actors and developing countries are limited in their engagement in global governance for sustainable development. Beginning with the relevant literature about how these social actors face obstacles to full participation, we present the notion of what we call “disenfranchisement” to describe the condition of being marginalized within the global policy-making arena. We put forward a conceptual framework that outlines what we identify as the three dimensions of disenfranchisement. By dis-aggregating the notion of disenfranchisement into its constituent dimensions, we outline potential operationalizations of these dimensions. Through the dimensions, the framework explicitly describes the mechanics of disenfranchisement, outlining the reasons that these actors become disenfranchised. We conclude by presenting the ways in which this framework can be applied in future empirical research, which will be critical to understanding the challenges to meaningful inclusion of stakeholders in global governance for sustainable development.