Grassroots organizations and influencing public policy processes: Lessons from around the world

This overview article for the Symposium on Grassroots Organizations and Public Policy Processes for the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, addresses three questions: 1) To what extent are grassroots organizations (GOs) capable of having an impact on public policy processes9 2) How do they influence public policy processes? and 3) what lessons can we draw to inform GOs’ effectiveness in the future? More specifically, the article reviews the strategies of GOs presented in the eight articles included in the Symposium, examines the type of policy influence in which they engage, discusses the structures, resources, and tools they have at their disposal, and draws implications for GOs’ approaches to influencing public policy processes The Symposium and its analysis in this article reveals 1) the flexibility of GOs in adopting a variety of structures and strategies; 2) the resilience of GOs in operating in a range of political and cultural contexts with varied degrees of favorability, and 3) the resourcefulness of GOs in fully utilizing all their resources, gaining access to new ones, and conserving latent capacity for when it really counts.