Although the importance of involving civil society organizations in the implementation process of European policy has been widely acknowledged, little is known about what determines the capacity of civil society organizations monitoring the implementation of EU directives in national context and how it differs across member states. Departing from the literature on the strength and weaknesses of civil societies in Western and CEE member states and linking it to network institutionalism and graph theory, this study sets out to capture the different sources of capital that determine the monitoring capacity of civil society organizations. By applying social network analysis in a comparative case study on the networks of women’s groups in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, differences in the configuration of their monitoring network are demonstrated. The preliminary results show that the women’s groups in the Western member states tend to be better equipped with human, financial and social capital, while women’s groups in the CEE region compensate for this lack of resources by linking up with influential actors on a European level.
