17/11/2025
The recent 2025 Open Government Summit in Spain provided plenty of inspiration for anyone interested in the future of democracy and governance and I wanted to share a few reflections on a particularly insightful session about lobbying and lobbying regulation.
The usual arc of arguing…
- The session topic was extremely timely and topical. Discussions about lobbying regulations take on new urgency in these febrile, populist times, with public trust in governments collapsing and suspicions of elite collusion between business and political leaders at all-time highs.
- Yet, despite the turbulence, discussions about how to bring more transparency, accountability, and responsibility to lobbying usually follow well-worn argumentative paths—producing little in the way of fresh ideas or conclusions.
Industry stakeholders—at least those willing to engage in such conversations—typically declare themselves fully committed to reform. But only a few minutes into the debate, the leitmotif of political equality inevitably surfaces: everyone – these lobbyists argue -, should be treated the same. Since professional lobbyists already report their activities and partly also their funders, it’s civil society that must take the next steps—measured by the same standards and held equally accountable. Implicitly or explicitly, the claim is that only this symmetry ensures fairness and democracy.
… that turns into a dead-end
- At this point, NGO representatives often become defensive, offering anecdotes about how such measures could put them in harm’s way. The conversation starts meandering, loses sight of clear, worthwhile reform efforts and then time is up and we all reconvene half a year later at some other policy summit.
- And to be honest there’s indeed often a lingering aftertaste—that perhaps the industry’s claim isn’t entirely wrong, and that there may be a tinge of hypocrisy in some NGOs’ demands versus their own lobbying conduct.
The fallacy of superficial political equality
- That sentiment isn’t entirely wrong—but it’s mostly misguided.
- It is a partially right as many NGOs are unduly relaxed about disclosing their funding and about their processes for generating accountability to the constituencies and causes they claim to fight for (other than donor reporting). They could and should do much more on this front—but not to satisfy some abstract notion of political equality. Rather, to build the trust and legitimacy needed with both those they claim to represent and those they seek to influence.
- And this brings me to why the industry argument that lobbying rules should first bring civil society up to speed in the interest of political equality before pondering more ambitious reform efforts seems incomplete and misguided.
- Political equality is not about absolute sameness and absolutely uniform treatment. Effective political equality is about creating the conditions for and enabling the most inclusive, pluralistic engagement in a lived reality that is inhabited by political actors with very different motivations, capabilities, and sources of legitimacy for why they deserve to be heard. Labour unions are different from church groups, companies are different from think tanks, NGOs are different from trade associations and this is not even talking yet about diversity in size, geographic origin and scope.
- Ignoring all these diversities – the different social, economic and political functions and resources for legitimacy, the different relations to public interest and the common good, very practically the different organisational forms and disproportionate regulatory burdens and most consequentially the highly asymmetric capabilities for influence and effective political voice – brushing over all this in favour of a one-size-fits-all regulatory approach does not promote political equality. On the contrary, it risks entrenching and deepening existing inequalities in access, influence, and voice.
Following tried and tested principles
- Taking a differentiated approach is neither an impossible, nor an unprecedented ask. To the contrary, this is the bedrock of how most legislation encodes proportionate treatment, effective equality, and fairness.
- Just think about common but differentiated responsibilities as a universally accepted approach to thinking about regimes that apply to Global North and Global South countries or just consider the principle of fair relative burden when it comes to taxation, that may be quarrelled over at the detailed implementation but stands uncontested as a foundational consensual principle to guide taxation all around the world. And to bring this back to the domain of lobbying all principal lobby actors are already being categorised and treated very differently when it comes to their governance requirements, disclosure obligations, tax status. If you are business association or NGO or business corporation you fall into very different categories with regard to business and association law with regard to tax law and yes, with regard to how you register in lobbying registries. Even the most humanoid interpretation of corporate personhood is legally and practically not the same, as equipped with the same suite of rights and privileges as natural personhood.
- So contrary to the superficial appeal of the claim that every lobby actor should be treated the same, which rings so true and obvious the argumentative onus is actually very much still in the proponents’ court. There is a really big need to justify why stray from a bedrock principle of differentiated regulatory policy-making for effective, not just superficial procedural fairness. And I have not heard a really persuasive argument why this should be the case.
- The strongest argument is perhaps that differential treatments would leave too many loopholes and invite regulatory arbitrage. Yet, the discretion to pick or change one’s organisational form is limited and choices are shaped by many material factors, with lighter lobby regulation a factor among many. A for-profit corporation cannot turn itself into an NGO overnight.
The mantra of political equality is well and good, but on closer inspection it much more strongly suggests a differentiated rather than reality-oblivious strictly uniform approach to lobby rules and regulation.
- Let me be clear. I think that lobby representatives participating in such discussions usually advance this argument in good faith. I do not suspect a massive sinister deflective tactics, when its appeal in such debates is perhaps more linked to its straightforward ring of common sense and reasonableness. Yet, even without sinister motives things can really take a problematic turn when the same superficial argument of equal treatment is appropriated by culture warriors for political gain as it comes in handy to bash unloved progressive NGOs and dismantle public interest funding and support infrastructure. All happening in front of our eyes. More and more and ever closer to home.
Future debates, future reforms
- So perhaps next time when talking lobby regulation in good faith among practitioners and advocates I hope we will be able to skip over the unpersuasive argument that political equality demands treating and regulating all lobbying the exact same. Let’s stop giving oxygen to political scaremongers eager to co-opt this debate. Let’s focus in on the really urgent needs to bring lobby rules up to speed, whether by designing guardrails for the use of AI in lobbying, addressing the largely ignored area of lobbying the judiciary or thinking about how associations could evolve into more responsible and accountable players as we are for example working on right now at The Good Lobby in our REBASE project.
- So much to do to restore trust, excitement and fair influence in policy making. Let’s keep our eyes firmly on the ball and not get side-tracked. And yes, NGOs should also clean up their own act as we move forward—it’s in their own best interest.
Written by Dieter Zinnbauer