Transnational Non-Governmental Organizations and Geography: A German Perspective

Résumé 0

Political Geography has for a long time been focused on state/governmental actors and territorial questions, often with regard to border-related problems within national contexts (criticized as territorial trap in the international literature).While the growing importance of border-crossing and scale-transcending non-governmental actors has been dealt with in the political and social sciences since the 1990s, it has only recently been given attention by geographers. This paperaims to give evidence of the high spatial relevance of these actors focusing on transnational NGOs, and to inform the French geographic community about the perspectives being developed in Germany. Contours of a Political Geography of civil society as well as processes of spatial change relevant to other sub-disciplines,such as Urban, Economic and Development Geography, are there by out lined. In the first part of the paper general definitions and concepts from the political and social sciences are summarized. In the second part spatially relevant perspectives on transnational civic action are categorized and exemplified.