The context of austerity now enveloping Europe provides its own structure of political opportunity.  The panel examines the impact of this upon NGOs and social movements, and the relationship between them.  Cullen’s focus on collaboration across the EU civil society sector is conducted through a case study of the (European) Social Platform, with an interest in the extent to which such collaboration grows into a form of social movement organizational community.  Stubbergaard also examines political coordination among transnational civil society organizations, from the perspective of how different NGOs try to strengthen citizenship rights through their membership of the European Womens’ Lobby (EWL), also focusing on co-ordination and (temporal) collective identity.  Lee and Johansson have a fresh data set on the Social Platform and its members as well as case studies of EU NGOs, assessing how EU-based CSOs working with social policy related issues have responded to these changing circumstances of both expanding as well as curtailed political opportunities.  Ruzza investigates the impact of the crisis on the political opportunities of antiracist organisations at EU level, examining their governance relations with organisations in Member States, focusing in particular on test cases of Italy and the UK. Sanchez Salgado analyses the extent to which EU governance arrangements are still able to generate identifiable changes in CSOs in times of crisis, exploring how the use of European opportunities has been altered by the economic crisis, and the way in which the economic crisis has affected the Europeanization of domestic CSOs though data from cases in France, Spain (of particular contextual interest), and the UK.