How do civil society organizations influence climate change politics? Evidence from India, Indonesia, and Finland

ABSTRACT In this article, the efforts of civil society organizations to influence climate change policymaking in three countries with very different traditions of democratic decision making are compared: in a newly developed democracy (Indonesia), in an established democracy in the Global South (India), and in an established democracy in the Global North with an exceptionally strong civil society (Finland). The empirical material consists of 57 in-depth interviews with Civil Society Organization (CSO) representatives. The following three arguments about CSO influence in climate change politics are made: (1) the nation-state is an important avenue of influence for most CSOs, alongside global institutions; (2) CSOs influence states through specific contact points, rather than by challenging the state as a uniform entity; and (3) CSO actors’ perception of influence in climate politics may be stronger where state capacity is weaker, rather than where civil society itself is strong.


Introduction
Today's worldwide mobilization on the climate emergency, spreading on social media channels and gathering schoolchildren, indigenous peoples, politicians, and many others to back climate scientists' claims, builds on more than two decades of work by environmental organizations and activists to steer global climate politics toward a sustainable track. That work has been documented by a relatively extensive social science literature (e.g., De Moor, 2018;Gereke & Brühl, 2019;Hadden, 2014Hadden, , 2015Kuyper & Bäckstrand, 2016;Wahlström et al., 2013). Much of this literature has focused on activism in and around UN Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. But what happens between the COPs, when the summit is over and the activists go home and continue their daily struggles not only on the streets, but in different lobbying and negotiation efforts? What kind of efforts have the globally networked climate activists made in relation to the state in their home countries? How do their work and influence differ in countries of the North and the South? We argue that an increased understanding of the former features notably enriches our picture of the global civil society struggle for climate sustainability and justice.
This article contributes to the literature on the role of civil society in climate change politics by adding a hitherto scarcely explored approach: on the one hand, taking statecivil society relations from the activists' point of view as a starting point and, on the other, comparing qualitative interview data from countries that represent the different blocs of global climate politics: Indonesia from the global 'South,' India from the quickly developing BRICS bloc, and Finland from the global 'North' (see Downie & Williams, 2018). While this qualitative interview study does not pretend to cover these blocs, it is an attempt without many precedents to compare civil society actors' understanding of climate politics at the national level while also considering the layout of the global scale.
We add to the existing research, first, by analyzing civil society actors' ways of understanding their place and role regarding their respective national and local governance contexts, and second, by juxtaposing these understandings from the three extremely different contexts and asking how the similarities and differences emerging from the interviews might be explained. By analyzing the CSO representatives' accounts of where and why they saw their biggest chances to make a difference in climate politics, we address the debate on the assessment of civil society influence. We ask whether there are topic-specific factors in climate politics that a comparative analysis can help unravel and show similarities and differences between the three starkly different country contexts and propose explanations thereon.
In the following section, we outline the three main arguments of our study and show how they contribute to the literature on climate change activism and the role of civil society organizations vis-à-vis nation states and present the three national contexts of our study. In section three, we present our data and methods. In sections four, five, and six, we present the empirical evidence for the three arguments outlined at the beginning. In section seven, we discuss the main implications of our results.

Three Arguments and Their Contributions to the Literature
This section reviews the literature on globally connected civil society organizations, their relationships to states and international climate negotiations, and comparative research on the strength of civil society in different countries, with the aim of showing how the three main arguments we make in this article contribute to the literature.
First, there is a literature documenting the rise of globally networked CSOs in general and global climate activism to which we add by arguing that climate change CSOs target, most of the time, national governance structures rather than, or at least alongside, global decision-making venues. This argument is interesting as it holds in a diverse set of organizations across our three very different case countries. It also sheds light to the positions of the CSOs between the global and the national/local arena: these may differ greatly, from alliance to the transnational movement goals on the global scene to adherence to a government-led policy process at the national level.
Most literature on climate activism has focused on the global level. The counter summits and demonstrations around the UN's COP meetings, as well as participation of civil society organizations inside the COPs, have been the subject of several studies (De Moor, 2018;Gereke & Brühl, 2019;Hadden, 2014Hadden, , 2015Kuyper & Bäckstrand, 2016;Reitan & Gibson, 2012;Wahlström et al., 2013). This focus is in line with the more general literature on global civil society that emphasizes the increasing importance of global CSO networks and their ways of targeting international institutions and global corporations (Castells, 2008;Kaldor, 2003;Keck & Sikkink, 1998;Smith et al., 1998;Smith et al., 2017;Smith & Wiest, 2005).
The authors do not intend to deny the importance of the transnational level for the climate movement or movements in general. Instead, we want to sharpen the picture and enrich it by turning the focus to the national level and taking a comparative perspective to assess the extent to which CSO influence strategies and their perceptions of success vary across a set of diverse case countries. This comparative approach looks beyond the single country case studies that have investigated the activities of climate change movements at the national level (e.g., Carter & Childs, 2018) or focused on how CSOs lobby national delegations at the global climate negotiations (Betzold, 2014;Rietig, 2016). The organizations we studied were very well connected globally and did engage in globally coordinated efforts to influence international institutions. However, when we asked where the activists saw the key emphasis of their work to be, they repeatedly referred to national level political bodies.
Second, the standard international relations literature on global political problems, such as climate change, tends to view states as uniform entities with predetermined interests, and to treat world politics as interaction between such states (e.g., Posner & Weisbach, 2010). This approach has been criticized by those who point out that actors in the 'global environmental regime' (Hironaka, 2014) have various ways of influencing national policies (Bernstein & Cashore, 2012). State interests are in fact constructed in interaction with other states and various international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. We extend this criticism by arguing that states are not only subject to outside influence but also internally diverse. States consist of various organizations and localized practices of policymaking, each open to influence by different domestic and foreign interest groups and other non-state organizations. Indeed, 'the state' is always somewhat imaginary, and more than a state apparatus it is a set of practices and processes and their effects that can be explored through encounters (Trouillot, 2001, p. 131). Thus, for the organizations we interviewed, 'the state,' as an object of their advocacy work, could mean many things, from a ministry to a specifically constituted administrative board, and was described sometimes through accounts of fruitful cooperation, at other times of neglect or repression-within the same country, even within a single interview.
These observations lead us to argue that CSO actors' efforts to influence state actors on a specific issue sector, such as climate politics, proceed through specific contact points, rather than through challenging and influencing the state as an entity, as may be the picture that is gained when focusing on protest actions of these same actors. Our approach here draws on anthropology-of-the-state literature (Abèles, 1990;Trouillot, 2001;Krohn-Hansen & Nustad, 2005;Tsing, 2005, Sharma andGupta, 2009). This literature approaches the state as a bundle of controversial, conflicting, multi-level institutions and practices linked in complex webs of local, global, transnational, and other interdependencies. Understanding the state as a complex set of differing, sometimes even contradictory practices and processes introduces a novel perspective on civil society engagement on climate change (Lounela, 2019a).
We also show that contact points between civil society and the state are rarely stable. The priorities of different state organizations may change rapidly with changes in government, and the processual nature of state-civil society relations (D'Alisa & Kallis, 2016) requires greater appreciation to understand the shifts in climate politics, too. By considering the diverse and volatile practices and temporal dimensions of the state, we expect to gain a deeper insight into the challenges CSOs face in their efforts to influence it.
Third, the influence of civil society actors has been addressed by social scientists in a long debate that highlights how challenging such influence is to measure, be the viewpoint that of objective effectiveness of activism or more relative 'success' of social movements (e.g., Cable & Degutis, 1997;Giugni, 1999, Luhtakallio, 2019, Uba, 2009). We agree with Hornsey et al. (2006), among others, on the importance of considering different dimensions of effectiveness: direct influence on decision making may be but one aspect thereof, and equally important are, for instance, activist groups' internal understandings of influence. Indeed, it has been suggested that from within activist groups, 'success' may be defined in a variety of ways from proven policy influence into satisfaction on the style of expression of opinions, and this variety has important consequences both to chosen action strategies and the understanding of civil society's opportunities more at large (Luhtakallio, 2012;Ylä-Anttila, 2005). Furthermore, as De Moor and Walhström, (2019) have suggested based on an analysis of the global climate movement, besides adapting to the prevailing political opportunities (McAdam et al., 2003), the movement actors 'construct stories about themselves in relation to their environment, as well as their history, presence, and projected future' and draw on these narratives to further build their strategies (De Moor and Walhström, 2019, 420). While our comparative analysis concentrates on activists' descriptions of their experiences of lobbying the respective state actors rather than on future strategies of the movement, we stress the self-perception of influence for similar reasons: to shed light on what climate activists in these countries, marked by very different state-civil society relations, make of their context of action.
The literature on states and civil societies often compares the strength of the civil society with that of the state in different countries, typically portraying countries like Finland with an exceptionally strong civil society, and countries like Indonesia, and to some extent India with much weaker civil societies (e.g., Jepperson, 2002;Salamon & Anheier, 1997;Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001;Yutaka, 2003). Contrary to what this literature might lead to expect, by emphasizing the actors' perception of influence, we will argue that civil society actors' understanding of their influence on climate change politics may be strongest not in the countries where the CSOs are well organized and resourced (Finland) but rather in those where the administrative capacity of the state (Christensen & Nielsen, 2010;Dimitrova, 2002;Farazmand, 2009) is weaker (Indonesia and India), leaving more room for CSOs to maneuver. Thus, when a new policy problem is fed into the national political and administrative system from the global political field, in states with weaker administrative capacity, civil society organizations take on some of the responsibilities that the state would handle in a country with greater administrative capacity. The activists' self-perceptions of their influence in this respect are a feature that only little is known of in the context of civil society climate politics, and even less so through a comparative lens between contexts in the Global South and the Global North.

Case Selection, Material and Methods
The literature on Finland invariably argues that the civil society there is exceptionally strong (Alapuro & Stenius, 1987;Alapuro & Stenius, 2010;Luhtakallio, 2012;Siisiäinen & Blom, 2009;Ylä-Anttila, 2010). As in the other Nordic countries, CSOs were historically essential to nation-and state-building processes, organized democratically from the grassroots to the level of national umbrella organizations and seen as part of a system in which 'the will of the people' was generated and transmitted to decision makers at the national level (Amnå, 2006). This history has created a political system in which participation in CSOs is extremely high by global comparison and CSOs are generally seen as an important part of almost any policy process. Environmental organizations have been part of Finnish civil society since the late nineteenth century. They have been connected to global civil society networks such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature from the beginning, with these connections becoming increasingly intensive from the 2000s. The first climate change campaign was launched by Friends of the Earth (FoE) Finland in 1997. It was followed by several others, including the Big Ask campaign in 2007, which became the centre of the Finnish climate change movement.
Indonesia is, in many respects, very different from Finland in its civil society-state relationship. Its mass-based civil society organizations have historical roots in the early twentieth century and the anti-colonial movement that took part in building the independent Indonesian nation-state. Associational activity was vivid but filled with tensions in the first decades of independence. The Suharto dictatorship  restricted, or even suppressed, political associational activity. Labour, peasant, and religious organizations had a wide membership but were either dependent on the state or avoided engaging in openly political activities. This situation led people to seek political space in those civil society organizations that were not subject to government repression (Aspinall, 2005). Environmental organizations occupied a special position in Indonesia: they were considered apolitical and not dangerous to the state, so they were permitted ( (Lounela, 2015;Nomura, 2007;Peluso et al., 2008;Tsing, 2005). Openly political organizations emerged only after 1998 (Lounela, 2009(Lounela, , 2019bNyman, 2006;Robinson & Hadiz, 2004). Thus, the whole idea of an organized civil society in the sense that is understood in long-established democracies is very recent. As in many lower-income countries with recently established democracies, a significant number of CSOs in the environmental sector tend to be driven by the concerns of international institutions and the donor community (Lounela, 2001). CSO involvement in climate change politics in Indonesia can be traced back to 1989, when WALHI, the Indonesian Forum for Environment, along with other organizations formed the Climate Action Network-Southeast Asia (Sari, 2010). Many more organizations became involved when the 13th COP was organized in Bali in 2007. International donors, such as the Ford Foundation, Hivos, and Oxfam, funded the establishment of the Indonesian Civil Society Forum on Climate Justice (CSF) to bring voices from the grassroots to the negotiators.
India occupies a middle ground in this respect. CSOs have not been suppressed in the same way there as in Indonesia, and there is a strong tradition of mass social movements and organizations that have inspired their western counterparts, starting from Gandhi's independence movement (Chabot, 2012). Many environmental organizations are dependent on foreign donors, but at the same time, India has a relatively long-established democracy and a large economy capable of generating domestic funding for CSOs. CSOs have long occupied an important role in Indian climate policymaking (Rahman & Roncerel, 1994), starting from the influential report 'Global Warming in an Unequal World,' published by the Center for Science and Environment in 1991 (Agarwal and Narain, 1991). A significant increase in the number and diversity of civil society organizations working on climate change has occurred since around 2004, the sharpest increase taking place in 2007 (Ylä-Anttila & Swarnakar, 2017).
These three countries were selected to build a comparative axis between the Global South and the Global North, while basing on the authors' previous familiarity with climate action in the case countries. The study is based on 57 thematic interviews conducted with civil society actors in climate politics in India (N = 20), Indonesia (N = 18), and Finland (N = 19) between 2010 and 2015. 1 In each country, in-depth background research was carried out to map the most important civil society organizations in climate politics. We consulted the existing research literature, media sources, local activists, and academics to select the organizations. We made sure to include both the most influential actors in building the movement from the grassroots, as well as those that are more institutionalized. Therefore, in each country, the background of the interviewees varies from groups concentrating primarily on street protests and campaigns to groups directing their efforts mainly to lobbying. (See Appendix 1 for the list and descriptions of CSOs included in the study.) The Indian and Finnish materials were collected in a research project addressing civil society and climate change from a comparative perspective (Alapuro, 2010;Luhtakallio & Tavory, 2018; see also Ylä-Anttila et al., 2018). For the Indian case, we had native collaborators and assistants who provided indispensable aid both in terms of historical and local knowledge and networks (see Ylä-Anttila & Swarnakar, 2017). For the Finnish case, the study built, on the one hand, on the basis of the authors' long-term track record of studying Finnish civil society (Luhtakallio, 2012;Ylä-Anttila, 2010), and on the other, on ethnographic fieldwork by Luhtakallio among climate activists (Luhtakallio, 2019). The Indonesian case is based on Lounela's long-term engagement in anthropological fieldwork in the country, concentrating particularly on power struggles and disputes in environmental politics at the local and national levels (Lounela, 2001(Lounela, , 2009. The interviews were conducted in each country specifically for this study, and in each case, they were partly conducted by the authors and partly by local assistants. 2 We used the same interview guide in each country (see Appendix 2).
The analysis was carried out in four phases. First, each set of interviews was studied by the author in charge of the case. Second, all authors read each other's notes and first interpretations of the material before comparing the themes that emerged as particularly important in the respective cases. Third, each author returned to their 'own' datasets with the results of the first comparative scheming effort and mapped convergences and differences in each theme that had emerged as significant in one or more of the cases. We then established an analytical grid based on the observations that the interviewee's talks about the state, the volatility thereof, and their evaluations of the successfulness of their own actions were the prevalent themes in all cases portraying interesting differences and convergences. Subsequently, relevant parts of the interviews were organized according to the themes of the analytical grid. 3 Despite the above efforts to collect, organize, and analyze the data in a similar manner, we do not pretend to provide a comparative setting of three equal and thoroughly corresponding cases. Instead, the nature of the comparison acknowledges the contextual differences in conceptual entities, such as 'the state' (Krause, 2016;Luhtakallio, 2012). Therefore, the three cases are, while not 'apples and oranges,' deliberately and obligatorily dissimilar to a degree. Our triad 'comparison of edges' (see Luhtakallio & Tavory, 2018) is an analytical construct designed to respond to the research questions we set out to answer, rather than providing a full descriptive illustration of the climate movements in three countries.
In the following sections, we present empirical evidence from the interviews to substantiate the three arguments we outlined above: The national level is the primary arena of influence for these climate activists; 'the state' that they aim to influence consists of a varying set of contact points; and the CSO actors' perception of their capacity to influence their states depends on the contextual setting of state-civil society relations and the administrative capacity of the state in each case.

The National Political Arena: CSO Actors' Perceptions of Influence and Interlocutors
At the time of our interviews, the climate movement had developed a certain maturity in all three countries. The movements that our interviewees were engaged in included both CSOs with controversial relations to their national state context and those that had formed relatively well-established working relations with government agencies. To understand, on the one hand, how the CSOs perceived their own position in climate politics, and on the other, who, for them, were the most important actors to address to influence climate politics, we asked the respondents to describe their own activities and to name actors they deemed as the most central in climate politics nationally and globally. In all three countries, the actors named as the most central ones were almost exclusively national-level organizations. The two actors that received by far the most mentions from the interviewees in India were The Prime Minister's Office (and the PM's council on climate change in particular), The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, followed by The Energy and Resources Institute, Centre for Science and Environment and Centre for Policy Research. In Indonesia, the top five mentioned were the Government, the President, Ministries of Environment and Forestry, State-related climate change institutions (such as SATGAS REDD+, UKPM4), and the UN-related actors and forums. In Finland the most often mentioned actors were the Ministry (and Minister) of Environment, the Prime Minister, the Confederation of Finnish Industries, the Finnish Forest Industries, and the Finnish Parliament shared the fifth place with fellow climate organizations (that were either cited as 'the other climate CSOs' or named in varying order). In the following, we describe the CSOs' positions in terms of influencing the state in their three contexts in terms of these two interwoven aspects: their perceived influence, and the interlocutors they deemed to be the most important ones.
In India, a representative of IN-CSO13 4 recounted the organization's activities related to climate change by describing, with an air of modesty, an impressive set of accomplishments at the top levels of policymaking.
We come out with independent research on climate negotiations and climate policy … We provide input for the government of India in drafting national policy … It's a technical support for the [international] negotiations. At the sub-national level, we have drafted state action plans for a couple of states. (IN-CSO13) The list of policy documents that this CSO has drafted, and the policy bodies it has participated in is remarkable. Nonetheless, this was business as usual, something it has done for a long time. An interviewee from another Indian CSO also described its relationship to climate policymakers as close, albeit strained.
Like I said, our organization heads are on extremely crucial bodies. They are part of those decision-making bodies, so it's very close contact in that sense. Close contact, close enough to present our views. And we are unpopular because, you know, we voice our views way too strongly, it's like, in your face. (IN-CSO9) The above cited activist draws a two-sided picture of the organization's role, being simultaneously well-placed and 'unpopular.' The interviewee talked about the organization's unpopularity with a certain pride, and we assume this emphasis was for balance with the CSO's sensitive role as a 'government helper', a potentially complicated position both internally and vis-à-vis other CSO actors nationally and globally.
Overall, both organizations' representatives-along with several others in the Indian data-described positions they themselves perceived as very influential on national policies and national positions in international negotiations. Even though both the above referred CSOs regularly send representatives to the UN COPs, when asked about their influence, the interviewees repeatedly spoke of influencing national policies and positions as their primary tasks.
In Indonesia, despite the strong international connections of a few key organizations, the agenda and strategy of environmental CSOs has always been nationally oriented. Many conservation CSOs have co-operated with the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry, the most influential ministry regarding forest issues, but also extremely corrupted (Enrici & Hubacek, 2016), even though the Ministry blamed especially local shifting cultivators and indigenous peoples for forest degradation. While also critical environmental organizations at times cooperated with the Indonesian Ministry of Environment, 5 other CSOs had a long record of using legal campaigns to resist the state and foreign investors' development projects to exploit natural resources. Nonetheless, the national level was the key target of all these actors even though the CSO positions vis-à-vis state actors varied between organizations, and in time within organizations. Some CSOs have a relatively direct access to influential people and the Environmental, Forestry or Agricultural Ministries, or the national climate change bodies UKP4 6 and Satgas REDD, and many have managed to translate access into a concrete role in policymaking. For instance, an interviewee with a long perspective of acting in ID-CSO2 explained that the organization has moved from merely talking with the government to actually drafting policy documents. The representative described this change of strategy for holding the government to account: If we let them know something, the response is normative; positive but not concrete. We have to come back … we had this meeting approach, but now we have started to write documents and concrete solutions on the paper, so that we have some concrete parameters to check if they fulfill their promises. (ID-CSO2) Some interviewees, even representing chapters of international environmental organizations, explicitly stated that trying to influence global-level politics directly was futile. For example, one representative of a local chapter of an international CSO, ID-CSO3, described efforts to influence at the global level as fruitless, and that influencing state policies relating to climate change, such as those on forest, land, and palm oil, felt much more feasible.
While many CSO representatives were careful with their words-their accounts were far from the self-assured tone of their Indian counterparts-they described in rich detail what they regarded as relatively wide opportunities to approach and access decisionmaking bodies they regarded as open to CSOs. The initial access to these processes was, according to them, often granted through personal contacts and previous connections, and even though Indonesia is a big country, the influential persons both among the decision makers and CSOs tend to know each other at least by name.
At the local level, some CSOs said they had a relatively direct and open route to the highest levels of government, through their ethnic, relative, or working relationships. For instance, a representative of a local ID-CSO10 described how they used to exchange text messages with the Governor of their region. The CSO also had ready access to the regional media. The regional government formulated its own regional REDD + strategy (STRADA) after the president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, declared the region a pilot province for REDD + in 2010. The STRADA formulation process was led by the governor, who formed a local team, the composition of which was influenced by CSOs. However, when people in government or administration change, it affects a CSO's scope for influence at both the local and national levels.
The Finnish climate movement scene has been characterized by the country's relatively small circles of environmental politics. The climate CSOs formed a small, tightly connected network (see also Luhtakallio & Tavory, 2018). Their influence was often exercised through personal relationships; on many occasions, a relationship with just one person in one municipality, one ministry, or one board made a difference. A representative of a small environmental CSO recognized the importance of those small circles clearly: Finland is such a small country. I personally know a few MPs-but I know a lot of people who know the current minister of environment, and some people who have been very active in [FI-CSO6] know plenty of other socially influential people, so it's a really, small country, small circles. (FI-CSO6) As in India and Indonesia, for most Finnish CSO actors the national scene has been the primary context of action. Although Finnish climate politics is closely tied to the European Union (EU), this has not diminished the importance of national-level policy preparation. Clearly, in the CSOs' understanding, the EU and other supra-or transnational levels were subordinate to the national level in importance, probably reflecting their assessment of their chances of influencing policies and discussions, which were often prioritized in the Finnish CSO actors' understanding of what constituted as successful action (see also Luhtakallio, 2012). Even FI-CSO4, an umbrella organization of development organizations funded mainly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, regarded the national level as its primary sphere for climate issues: This (national climate politics) is our bread and butter-in principle, we follow the EU level so that we manage to react at the right point of the national preparatory work, and of course we also try to be alert on the international side, but we really strive to concentrate on the national level as much as possible. That's our focus.  To sum up, our interviewees gave varying accounts of the extent to which they felt they could influence policy processes. The first significant common thread that ran through our interviews was that in all three contexts, even the organizations that participated directly in global climate negotiations targeted most of their efforts at influencing national policies and national positions in international negotiations through interlocuters that varied from government actors to different state-related organizations and in some cases, to organizations close to climate-related industries and technologies.

The State Is Not a Uniform Entity
The second theme, the state as a manifold, even volatile entity, emerged often when the interviewees described their long-term commitment to the climate movement and their efforts to getting their voices heard. In these instances, the CSO actors repeatedly talked about a specific interlocutor-a policy drafting committee, a governor, or a minister-or a chain thereof. The 'state' as an entity could not be described as either receptive or unreceptive to CSO claims. Rather, some government bodies were willing to negotiate or were receptive to claims by some CSOs while others, especially in India and Indonesia, were outright hostile. Moreover, in each country, the receptive contact points with the state varied over time due to changing circumstances.
In Finland, the most important manifestation of this phenomenon was the role of the Green Party Minister of Environment in the most significant achievement of the climate change movement, the Climate Change Act, a law that binds future governments to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in line with EU guidelines. 7 The CSOs lobbied among the Parliamentary groups and campaigned in public to push through the idea of legislationbased regulation and assessment of climate measures. The campaign was successful, and with political support from the Green Party, in government at the time, the law came into effect in 2015 (Finlex, 2015). The CSO actors often talked about the Act as a great victory for the Finnish climate movement. They even described the campaign with some surprise, because the political adversaries they had expected to stand in firm opposition to the law ultimately ceded quite 'easily.' The fact that the Ministry of Environment was led by a Green Party minister was described by nearly all the interviewees as instrumental in passing the law and in making other CSO claims visible in policy processes. As the representative of the involved FI-CSO1 put it: I'd say that the crucial player in climate politics is the Climate Politics Ministerial Group; that's where the strong directions are set. And the Ministry of Environment, especially with Niinistö's lead, strengthened the climate political debate.  However, according to our interviews, the Green Party Minister of Environment was not the only actor receptive to CSOs' climate political views. The Finnish CSO representatives noted a general tendency when interacting with both national and local government entities: indirect influence was possible, but it was crucially important to know the people prone to be 'open' to CSO views. An FI-CSO3 activist described this tendency and suggested, circumspectly, that CSO influence was possible even at high levels of policymaking, even if 'indirectly,' when one knew who to talk to: Well, it [influence on political decision-making concerning climate] is maybe more indirect. It might happen through affecting the tone and focus of the discussion. … In standing committees, it is certainly possible to influence those members who are receptive to your message.  Overall, CSO influence on climate politics in Finland seemed to depend on two things: how favourable the political (partisan) leadership of the Ministry of Environment was, and how well each CSO was aware of the particular people in various bodies who were interested in hearing CSO views on respective occasions.
In Indonesia, many visible actors in CSO climate politics were not specifically climate activists at all to begin with. ID-CSO6 used climate change negotiations and REDD + to further land mapping and territorial rights for indigenous peoples. The CSO participated in drafting legislation on indigenous peoples' land tenure rights that were justified by climate change programmes. The CSO had contact points with several state agencies: we were told they had a Memorandum of Understanding with the national land agency (Badan Pertanahan Nasional), the Ministry of Environment, and the National Committee of Human Rights (Komnas HAM). The Indonesian climate policies became heavily intertwined with the UN REDD + program, and foreign donors played an important role therein. A representative of this CSO described the power play position the organization had managed to achieve, saying that the ministries and climate change bodies were afraid of losing REDD + or other climate change funds if the CSO refused to collaborate with them, since foreign donors put great emphasis on human and indigenous peoples' rights and participation: The government, really committed to international [agencies], is really afraid if indigenous people [masyarakat adat] are not on board because there will not be REDD [without them]. Because REDD sites are located where there are good forests and that is normally indigenous land; there is no way the government could access that land otherwise. (ID-CSO6) By contrast, an Indonesian peasant organization (ID-CSO4), which collaborated with the more 'radical' CSOs (such as ID-CSO1 and 10), resisted the idea that climate change negotiations would bring any change. It was active in forming people's movements that would stay out of the official fora and voice their opposition. Overall, the Indonesian CSOs had a variety of allies and opponents, and no one clear tendency could be detected. This was due to the greater diversity of CSOs participating in climate politics and their respective goals, but also because of the local and national institutions' volatility in climate politics, due to the donor-driven character of the policy domain. 8 The government bodies eagerly invited to influential positions the CSOs that at each time represented requirements set by foreign donors.
In India, relations between some CSOs and the government were so strained that they were shut down. The case of a national chapter of an international CSO, IN-CSO20, is illustrative. From 2010, the CSO turned the focus of their climate change campaigning away from what they saw as largely unsuccessful efforts to push the government to take on more ambitious commitments to greenhouse-gas reduction in the international arena, toward more local affairs such as coal mining. When their critique turned toward the coal mining companies-eager backers of then Prime Minister Modi's agenda of creating economic growth through any means of energy production-the government audited the organization. Noncompliance with the laws regulating the use of accounting procedures related to foreign funding was found, and the CSO was shut down by the government.
This affair was part of a wider government campaign to use finance audits and other legal means to question the legitimacy of critical CSOs. Questionable use of foreign funding and alleged actions in the interest of foreign powers were the central tools of this campaign. At the same time, other CSOs continued to work with the government on climate policies, with relative success. Thus, in this regard, the Indian situation resembled that of Indonesia in that there were stark differences in the treatment of different CSOs by government bodies. In the case of Indonesia, environmental CSOs were in some cases accused of working illegally in Indonesia and for working for foreign countries' interest. Some CSOs also noted that they were invited to comment on governmental drafts, but their comments were not necessarily noticed in the final results. In the Finnish case, similar means were not used. The most critical CSOs, nonetheless, reported that they were gradually left out of UN summit delegations, for instance, and thus somewhat more subtle forms of silencing or by-passing may have been in use.
In sum, the climate activists' opportunities to influence the 'state' arose through specific contact points in different government institutions that happened to be receptive to their claims at a particular point in time. This receptivity varied over time due to things such as elections or shifting priorities of foreign donors. In Indonesia and India, we found a pronounced division between those CSOs that had direct access to government bodies and those that were treated indifferently or in a hostile manner.

State-Civil Society Relations in Climate Politics
Apart from the certain similarities emerging in the first two themes of analysis above, we found significant differences between the three contexts in how CSO activists talked about the efficiency of their actions, their successes, and their potential to influence climate politics. These differences were somewhat counterintuitive to the existing literature on state-civil society relations in the three case countries: CSO actors in Finland, where civil society is usually regarded as exceptionally strong, saw themselves having surprisingly scarce possibilities to influence state climate politics compared to their counterparts in the young democracy of Indonesia or in India.
The Indonesian CSO actors who stated to have influence over national climate change policies did so partly pointing at their connections with actors inside the state, but also because of their position in the climate movement in the national and global context. Some wished to stay out of any official fora and constituted a radical faction that promoted justice-based climate change mitigation with grassroots participation. Some took part in the national delegation to the COPs, implemented climate change programmes, and collaborated directly with the state. Others acted as 'experts' or drafted laws and took part in 'multi-stakeholder fora' organized by the Ministry of Forestry or Ministry of Environment and other government bodies dealing with climate policy. Naturally, their perceptions of influence varied accordingly, but the overall assessment of the efficiency of their actions was relatively strong.
For instance, at the time of the interviews, ID-CSO6 was active in the making of a map of the territories of Indonesian indigenous groups that was delivered to the government's REDD + agency. The activist we interviewed claimed that the organization has been influential in terms of how indigenous peoples' rights had been considered in the national REDD + strategy. Furthermore, together with other indigenous peoples' movements, the CSO was able to influence global climate change policies to adopt safeguards that stressed indigenous peoples as actors in the climate change mitigation policy.
Similarly, an ID-CSO2 representative said that the organization had taken 'leadership in a national [CSO] coalition for forest and climate change to promote rights-based safeguards.' Our interviewee described the process in which the CSO was able to play an influential role throughout the policy process, leading to a visible result:  was invited to participate in the REDD + Task Force and the REDD agency's effort to establish the whole structure of REDD + . ID-CS02 contributed to setting up the National Safeguards Framework, PRISAI. Most of the safeguard principles accommodated the CSO's safeguards framework, to which [ID-CSO2] had previously contributed significantly.  The CSO actors pointed out that the government's dependence on the international donor community worked to the CSO's advantage. The combination of strong donor influence, a government rather tolerant of CSOs, and connections to the leading figures in the governmental climate change bodies seemed to guarantee CSO influence in many instances, giving them confidence that they could access the formulation of the REDD + policies and revision of related legislation. A fragmented state eager to receive foreign funds opened a window of opportunity for CSOs that they exploited in a variety of ways. Not all CSOs were eager to take this opportunity, though. A group of radical organizations promoted justice-based climate change mitigation, and actors from these organizations were critical of governmental and international initiatives that they considered to be ultimately led by business corporations.
In India, as the preceding sections have already indicated, some CSOs saw themselves playing a central role in determining the government's agenda in the international climate change negotiations, as illustrated by the following quote: Q: Does it feel like it's possible to influence decision making?
A: Well, we have been influencing decision making to a great extent, with respect to international negotiations. I mean, the government position, it's pretty much the same as the position we have. … Our director general is the member of the Prime Minister's council on climate change, right. Then our deputy director general, he is a member of the basic expert committee. So, I mean, they are-they play a very important role in the advocacy and policy push.  Thus, in both Indonesia and India, while government bodies were not equally open to all CSO actors, actors from several organizations nonetheless described how they had access to top negotiation and decision-making positions.
In Finland, by contrast, while CSO actors could spot receptive government actors to lobby and had a certain confidence on their indirect impact, they were quite pessimistic and doubtful about direct participation and influence. They described Finnish climate politics as a field in which different actors were firmly niched. The picture the activists gave of the situation was rather bleak and often cynical in tone, as shown by the following FI-CSO3 representative. Q: So, are civil society's stances considered in the debate about climate policy?
A: From an expert point of view, not at all. I think the CSOs have been given this role in Finland in which they should say 'this thing is important' and then play by the rules of the media, so that if we want to raise an issue, we have to use a mascot of some sort, a demonstration, a campaign, or such like. It's a bit like prostitution, to be honest, but with the issue first you don't get to the headlines or anywhere.  The Finnish CSO activists generally thought they should be doing something other than organizing 'mascot campaigns.' They were frustrated by regularly being invited to and included in a wide range of policy processes, in which they were constantly left to conclude that their viewpoints and expertise fell on deaf ears. While the 'small country, small circles' principle helped Finnish CSO actors both in allying between themselves and assessing potential allies at different levels of policymaking, it had a downside. The civil society niche was restricting to them in terms of genuine exchange of ideas and influence.
In sum, we found that CSO actors in Finland perceived their influence on national climate policy as much weaker than those in India and Indonesia. On the one hand, this perception may stem from the different administrative capacities of the state in each country. In Finland, government research institutes and experts in ministries and other government bodies command significant resources and expertise, resulting in less need for civil society input in climate policy processes. In India, and to some extent in Indonesia, the kind of research and policy analysis conducted by government agencies in Finland is a job for CSOs. In Indonesia, the lack of administrative capacity of the state and the competition between different government institutions meant that foreign donors played a significant role in setting the agenda. For these donors, civil society involvement was an important condition, creating further opportunities for CSOs. On the other hand, the CSO actors in the three countries were likely to have relatively different expectations of their influence, and therefore also varying assessments thereof.
In the concluding section, we revisit the results of this study and reflect the strength and consequences of the three arguments we have built these analyses on.

Conclusion
We have shown in this article, firstly, that in a newly developed democracy, Indonesia, an established democracy in the Global South, India, and an established democracy in the Global North with an exceptionally strong civil society, Finland, climate CSOs all perceived the national government actors and state-related hybrid actors as their primary interlocutors and targets of action, regardless of whether their position was strongly critical or of a more collaborative spirit. They spoke much less about influencing international institutions or other actors, such as business firms, with the (corporatist) exception of some central unions of industry in Finland (cf. Colli & Adriaensen, 2020). Despite the strong differences between the three countries in terms of their position and role in global climate negotiations, global warming impact or expected impact, and the general structuring and role of civil society and its relations to the state, the national political institutions constituted the principal locus of importance for their actions, to the point that among the five most central interlocutors in climate politics, international actors were very seldom mentioned.
Secondly, we found that in all contexts, the state that the CSO actors targeted was far from a stable entity, but rather the different government bodies in each country had divergent goals that varied over time, depending on things such as elections or shifting donor priorities. As we have shown, civil society actors' understanding of their influence on policies depended to a great extent on their ability to identify and leverage the contact points in different government organizations that were receptive to their claims at a given time.
Third, in our analysis of the CSO activists' perceptions of their impact, civil society influence on climate change politics was regarded as at least as strong or stronger in Indonesia and India than in Finland. This finding runs counter to the state-civil society literature that generally sees Finnish civil society as exceptionally strong in international comparison, which would lead one to expect that CSOs have a great deal of influence in climate change policymaking there. In Indonesia, by contrast, the military dictatorship until 1998 strictly controlled most of the politically oriented civil society organizations hindering their development, which would lead us to expect that climate change CSOs there would not be very strong. India, our third case, occupies a kind of middle ground in this respect.
We suggest that this somewhat counterintuitive finding can be explained, on the one hand, by differences in the administrative capacity of the three states. The weaker capacity of the state institutions in Indonesia and India to gather information and use it effectively in international political negotiations opens space for CSOs as experts who complement the state's capacity to gather information and negotiate. Weaker administrative capacity may, thus, permit 'direct' access by CSO actors to top levels of policy making. By contrast, the Finnish case shows that a generally strong civil society and inclusive political culture does not guarantee influence of civil society organizations in all policy domains. In a country with strong administrative capacity, governmental research institutes, universities and ministries supply the necessary expertise for policy makers, leaving CSOs less room to function in this capacity.
To a degree, the activist viewpoints reflect the position given to CSOs in certain processes, among certain governmental bodies. However, part of this finding may reflect the different standards the CSO actors have to evaluate the effectiveness of their work: in Finland, the expectations may be higher to begin with, and thus disappointments quicker than in India and Indonesia. The differences in the self-perceived influence of the activists may also be explained by the fact that the activists evaluated the situation within their own contexttheir direct context of action, as well as the general societal 'climate', including the views on climate politics put forward by key policy actors and the tones in which climate related issues were discussed in the media. The former aspectskey policy actors' varying stakes and respective media climateswere not centrally addressed in our interviews, but certainly coloured the experiences of the interviewed CSO actors nonetheless.
Despite the comparatively somewhat surprising nature of this finding, respectively the activists' perceptions are in line with earlier research: in Finland, for instance, CSOs are less influential in climate change policy making than they are in many other policy domains, such as social policy (Gronow & Ylä-Anttila et al., 2019;Teräväinen, 2010). At least until very recently, a strong coalition consisting of representatives of energyintensive industries, trade unions and the biggest political parties has had much more say in climate and energy policy than environmental CSOs and their allies (Kukkonen & Ylä-Anttila, 2002;Lounela et al., 2019;Haukkala, 2018;Lyytimäki, 2011). There is some evidence, though, that this may be changing (Ylä-Anttila et al., 2020). Our findings are also consistent with earlier research on India that has pointed out how some well-resourced large CSOs have played an instrumental role in defining India's national positions in global climate negotiations as well as influencing the direction of domestic policy (Ylä-Anttila & Swarnakar, 2017 ;Vihma, 2011;Dubash, 2009). In the Indonesian case, much of the national climate change policy has focused on REDD + (Lounela, 2015). Internationally networking CSOs have influenced forest related climate change policies through agrarian reform and changes in forestland governance, which now have become official policies. At the same time, small or local CSOs might have much less influence (Freeman et al., 2010, p. 3: Longhofer 2016.
The above trends have, however, not been previously considered from the viewpoint of CSO actors, nor connected to their descriptions of the grassroots work they carry out among the respective state actors. Together, these analyses enrich the picture of civil society's input to the developments of climate policies and calls for further comparative research among the activists building the climate movement further today, in various state and other contexts, with undoubtedly varying perceptions of influence, and thus with different means and assets to build the future narratives of the movement.

Notes
1. The authors have had specific responsibilities in terms of collecting and pre-analysing the material, so that Ylä-Anttila has been primarily in charge of the Indian case, Lounela of the Indonesian case, and Luhtakallio of the Finnish case. 2. The authors thank Deya Roy and Pradip Swarnakar (India), Asep Firdaus (Indonesia),Tomi Lehtimäki, Elina Mikola and Veera Nurmenniemi (Finland) for their assistance in collecting the interviews. 3. In the final phase, the relevant parts of the Indonesian and Finnish interviews were translated into English. The Indian interviews were conducted in English. 4. To protect the interviewees and their organizations from any potential harm this study could cause them, particularly in the Indian and Indonesian cases, we refer to the CSOs by country code and a running number. The descriptions of the CSOs goals and working methods are provided in Appendix 1. 8. The donor impact had its roots in the end of the 1990s, when Indonesian CSOs received large amounts of support and funding from donors to 'democratize' the country because they were seen as less corrupt than governmental institutions (Lounela, 2001).