The ‘inclusion’ of civil society in the Organization of African Unity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract An increasing number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have established participatory mechanisms for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although affiliation with an IGO has been widely accepted as a source of NGO legitimacy, there have been few systematic efforts to investigate the mechanism of the institutional legitimation of NGOs. We investigate African NGOs affiliated with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to examine whether the rational-legal authority of IGOs is sufficient for the institutional legitimation of NGOs. We conducted a mini-case study as well as a longitudinal statistical analysis of African NGOs. We find evidence that the OAU affiliation status negatively impacted the growth of African NGOs. We conclude that the OAU used its affiliation status to invite ‘friends’ of state leaders instead of supporting the bottom-up voice of African civil society. Our study suggests that an IGO’s rational-legal authority is not enough for NGO legitimacy, but the institutional legitimation of NGOs may require substantive democratic deliberation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".