Doing Representation in Transnational Civil Society

In the light of multiple levels of interaction, blurring boundaries and shifting accountabilities in transnational politics, political representation seems to become a difficult undertaking. Traditional accounts of political representation conceptualize the constituency as an unmediated, authentic political reality (the citizens’ real preferences), which then provides “an origin and point of reference for assessing the accuracy and faithfulness of any attempt to represent it” (Disch 2011). Political representation in transnational civil society often fails to live up to such assessments of political representation. The roles of representatives are very interactive and under constant discussion, constituencies form dynamically, elections are rare instances of formality. This does not mean that political representation does not take place. When looking at the micro-level of how those actors are “‘doing’ in and on the world” (Adler and Pouliot 2011: 3), we can observe that transnational civil society activists are doing representation by inventing new roles for representatives and constituents, circumventing the traditional norms of political representation or translating them into their specific contexts. Cautiously, they initiate representation practices which develop organically in their network structures, follow horizontal chains of accountability and live very much from trust and responsibility. In this vein, constructivist representation theorists argued that political representation is not merely an act of responding to fixed preferences. Turning this debate into paths for empirical research from a practice theoretical angle, two cases (Friends of the Earth & Clean Clothes Campaign) are analyzed in view of the potentials and boundaries of political representation in this context.