Abstract
Within the last three decades, we have witnessed a considerable increase in the number of local environmental campaigns all over the world. They mostly emerged as a particular response to the threats that major projects, such as roads, airports, dams and so on pose to the natural environment as well as to the livelihood or the quality of life of locals. Focusing on various local environmental mobilizations in the European context, this edited volume deepens our understanding of local environmental campaigns, which have been relatively neglected in the literature, as the volume’s editor Christopher Rootes underlines in the introductory chapter.
The essays making up the volume, some of which are from leading social movement scholars, cover different cases of local environmental mobilizations that emerged in a range of local settings in five European countries: Britain, Italy, Greece, France and Ireland. They advance our knowledge of local environmental mobilizations in many ways. One of the most compelling aspects of these movements is that they reveal, in different ways, that local struggles over environmental issues are neither purely local nor purely environmental. Several of the essays evidently demonstrate that such mobilizations cannot be grasped in their full complexity if they are regarded as environmental and local struggles alone.
It is true that local movements mostly take shape in response to environmental issues at the local level, but they may transcend that localism in various ways. One way of going beyond the local level is to establish links with other local, regional, or national environmental actors and organizations, as shown by the second and the third chapters. In contrast to those arguments that national environmental organizations are more concerned with their organizational maintenance and public image than supporting local environmental campaigns, Saunders shows in the second chapter (‘The national and the local: Relationships among environmental movement organizations in London’) that national environmental organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of Earth lend considerable support to grassroots campaigns as long as these campaigns fit their organizational aims, and are not beyond their resource capabilities. Usually mediated through the brokerage of regional organizations, national organizations support local ones by training local activists, providing information and so on. In the third chapter (‘Still the time of environmental movements? A local perspective’), Diani and Rambaldo go a step further by dealing with how and to what extent the connections among environmental organizations lead to the formation of broader social movements. They focus on the environmental organizations in three cities (Bristol, Verona and Glasgow), demonstrating that the environmental organizations that have a dense web of alliances along with a common sense of environmental identity, like those in Bristol and Verona, form social movements.
Another way of exceeding the boundaries of localism as well as environmentalism is to tie a specific local environmental issue to wider issues, as indicated in the last three chapters within the volume. Local campaigns may link specific local environmental issues to wider national, international, or global issues, such as environmental costs of economic development, corporate globalization, nationalism, human rights, democracy and so on. Although it is usually claimed in the literature on environmental movements that such an ‘issue expansion’ is peculiar to environmental movements that emerge in the South, these three chapters make it clear that such expansion can also be detected in those movements in the North. Examining how the term Larzac, the name of a specific place, turned to signify contention due to hosting a number of campaigns from the 1970s onward, Franquemagne argues in Chapter 6 (‘From Larzac to the altermondialist mobilization: Space in environmental movements’) that environmental mobilizations can act both locally by defending and promoting a specific place, and globally by treating environment and, therefore, space as a common and global good.
In a parallel way, in Chapter 7 (‘Resisting the costs of “development”: Local environmental activism in Ireland’), Garavan also argues that local environmental protests may go beyond localism and environmentalism under certain conditions. Although localism is the defining feature of environmentalism in Ireland due to specific constraints and opportunities of the Irish political system, they may turn into more challenging national protests by linking a spatially and temporally specific issue to wider concerns with nature, as Garavan outlines in the case of North Mayo. That local environmental issues can be linked to broader economic and political issues is finally made evident by della Porta and Piazza in the last chapter (‘Local contention, global framing: The protest campaigns against the TAV in Val di Susa and the bridge on the Messina Straits’). The authors analyse symbolic struggles over meanings, identities and interests by focusing on two conflicts that emerged around two public works in Italy: the ‘No TAV’ protest against the building of a high-speed railway in northern Italy, and the ‘No Bridge’ protest against the construction of a bridge in the south of the country. They show how frames change during the course of struggles through the interactions of the protesters with various pro-TAV and pro-bridge actors, leading to tying typical local issues to broader economic and political demands such as the demand for different economic development models, and the demand for participatory democracy. Thus, these three chapters provide important insights concerning how local environmental campaigns take new – sometimes even rather different – meanings as they articulate broader issues along with the local ones.
The involvement of members of national political parties in local environmental campaigns may also help them to transcend localism, at least in the way of bringing their issue to the national agenda through attracting the attention of national news media. However, as Kousis shows in ‘Local environmental protest in Greece, 1974–94: Exploring the political dimension’, the involvement of political parties in matters of local environmental contention may not be as high as expected even in countries like Greece where it is assumed that the long-prevailing authoritarian rule prevented the development of civil society, leading to the domination of political parties in representing interests and channelling political participation. Political parties appear inclined to opportunistically participate only in those protests that usually involve a vast number of participants, raise specific issues such as marine, water and air pollution, and focus on lives under threat.
The essays in the volume also demonstrate how the characteristics of activists or local contextual factors affect local environmental mobilizations. Exploring environmental direct action (EDA) groups in the UK, Doherty, Plows and Wall demonstrate in Chapter 5 (‘Environmental direct action in Manchester, Oxford and North Wales: A protest event analysis’) that it is not political opportunities but rather the characteristics of these activists that explain the sustenance of environmental direct actions in the UK. Concerning the effects of local context on environmental mobilizations, Diani and Rambaldo show in Chapter 3 how Bristol, Verona, and Glasgow have substantially different network dynamics, as well as how the strong leftist culture in Glasgow prevents the development of distinctive environmental identities and movements, whereas the domination of politics by middle-class actors and concerns in Bristol and Verona paves a smoother path for the fulfilment of such endeavours. Garavan’s analysis, like that of Diani and Rambaldo, is also illustrative of the influence of dominant protest culture on environmentalism. It reveals how environmental protests in Ireland are framed in terms of dominant protest discourses such as nationalism or republicanism, thus placing environmentalism ‘in a continuum of anti-state protests’ (p. 128). Della Porta and Piazza show how the ‘No TAV’ protests made references to anti-Nazi resistance history in Val di Susa, and the ‘No Bridge’ protests made appeals to past battles in the area of the Messina Straits in constructing the identity of protesters.
Three contributions in the volume also deserve special notice for their contributions to the literature of social movements generally. First, some point out weaknesses of widely used social movement concepts such as political opportunities, protest cycles and framing, offering ways to refine these concepts. Doherty et al. show how those social movement approaches that tend to regard states as the main target of movements, such as political opportunity or dynamics of contention approaches, fall short of explaining environmental direct action protests that try to shape not state policies but popular perception in order to create a resistance culture. They also demonstrate how personal factors and relations between activists at the micro-level, rather than political opportunities, shape the patterns of direct action protests. Franquemagne pays attention to shortcomings of the framing approach in accounting for the evolution of a defensive and reactive local environmental protest against the use of a specific territory for the enlargement of a military camp, to an opposition against capitalism, internal colonialism and globalization. Della Porta and Piazza illustrate that symbolic construction of protests involves definition and redefinition of not only interests but also identities.
Second, the volume includes methodological contributions. The limitations of the newspaper reports as a data source for the analysis of environmental protests are underlined in the chapters by Kousis and Doherty et al. By comparing national media reports with local sources, Kousis shows that the former offer a partial and biased picture of community-based protests by representing only a small proportion of the protests, and by selecting only the largest and most contentious protests as well as those involving the presence of politicians. Doherty et al. point out that the attention of the national mass media may be much lower concerning those environmental campaigns that are based on direct actions of small groups of activists. Finally, the articles also contribute to social movement literature by focusing upon one of the silent issues in the literature: the role of place/space in protest movements. The chapters by Franquemagne and Garavan show how the meanings attached to a particular place affect local environmental mobilizations. While Franquemagne shows how a particular place turns into a space of contention, Garavan demonstrates how local protests, which are based on spatially and temporally specific issues, turn into national protests.
If there is one critique of the book it is that it focuses only on cases from European countries. The inclusion of essays that focus on non-European societies, particularly late-industrializing ones such as those in Asia, Latin America and Africa, would have been a valuable addition to the volume. Nevertheless, Acting Locally is a highly valuable book, contributing significantly to our knowledge of environmental mobilizations in particular and social movements in general.