Environmental non-profit organisations in public discourses: Challenges and opportunities of political institutionalization

Environmental non-profit organisations (ENPOs) become more and more involved in decision making. This study assesses how political institutionalisation might challenge the public legitimacy of ENPOs by affecting their position in public discourses. Specifically, we hypothesize that institutionalisation might influence discursive relations to other actors and the frames employed by an organization. A quantitative content analysis of the media coverage on the case of the Dutch energy agreement was conducted that allowed a comparison of institutionalised movement organizations to non-institutionalised ones and to other actors of the same institutional level. The findings revealed that institutionalisation affected patterns of actor references while, surprisingly, no substantial differences in the use of frames could be found. Overall, we find indications that institutionalisation primarily represents an opportunity as opposed to a threat for the public legitimacy of movement organizations.