Beyond Borders

Environmental Movements and Transnational Politics

Brian Doherty, Timothy Doyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317968597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

Globalisation is about transnational politics. While nation-state governments increasingly struggle with this new politics, which moves beneath, between and beyond national borders, others entities like transnational corporations have flourished. But it is not just business which increasingly bypasses these traditional boundaries. Environmental groups are also moving though this transnational space, and their politics are defined by such qualities as fluidity, ambiguity and rapid changes in identity, mission and structure. In this book, the politics of environmental movements are presented as particularly salient examples of these new phenomena.

Drawing on fieldwork from Europe, Asia, America, Africa and the Middle East, the contributors address a range of trans-national processes: efforts to construct common agendas transnationally; the diffusion of new repertoires of environmental protest; the role of environmental groups in the construction of new modes of environmental governance; how neo-liberalism affects local environmental activism; evidence of transnational influences and pressures on environmental politics in repressive regimes; and the dilemmas of defining questions of environmental justice and post-colonial environmental politics without suppressing the differences between environmentalism in different countries.

Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern Environmentalisms

BRIAN DOHERTY & TIMOTHY DOYLE

*School of Politics, Keele University, UK, **School of Politics and History, University of Adelaide, Australia

ABSTRACT This introduction considers three themes that recur across the various contributions to this collection. The first is the nature of borders and how these have been affected by the increase in transnational collective action and the growth in the power of transnational institutions. The second is the distinction between environmental movements and the social movement forms of environmentalism: meaning that not all forms of environmental movement are social movements. The third is the evidence of the diversity of environmentalisms, which leads us to identify three principal kinds of environmental movement, the post-material movements strongest in the United States and Australia, the post-industrial movements that are strongest in Europe and the post-colonial movements of the South.

Reflection on the history of environmentalism since the debates about risk and limits to growth emerged in the early 1970s shows that transnational conflicts over power and ideology have been central from the beginning of the new environmental politics. Limits to growth and ‘overpopulation’ arguments that came mainly from the North, while couched in terms of global humanity and nature, seemed to many in the South a further means by which the most powerful and wealthy countries could retain their control of the South. Reflection of this kind also reminds us how quickly things have changed. Many environmental ideas that recently seemed marginal are now mainstream, and some environmental movement organisations previously seen as outsiders have become institutionalised in national and international policy-making structures. This has led some to argue that the environmental movement is ‘the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time’ (Castells, 1997: 67), but we will argue here instead that it is more accurate to think of the environmental movement as still at an early stage in relation to shaping global politics. This collection of articles does not aim to provide a full overview of the nature of the environmental movement, either in the form of its most important national cases or by assessing and explaining its impacts on national or international political systems. Environmental movements have grown too numerous and transnational politics too complex for this to be feasible in one volume. Instead, the common focus is on understanding how transnational political processes affect what environmental movements can do, and why they choose to act as they do.

In this introduction we reflect on three questions that recur across the various contributions to this collection. First, we clarify what we mean when we talk of transnational politics. Second, as environmental movements have diversified so much, we discuss what it means to define only some of them as social movements. Third, we assess what ideological differences between different groups reveal about how environmentalism is developing, particularly across the conceptual and geographical borders that divide North and South.

Environmental Movements, Transnational Politics and Border Thinking

The new environmentalism of the 1970s was, from the beginning, global in its analysis, but there was very little evidence of global environmental protest action or of groups working effectively across borders. New organisations such as Greenpeace pursued direct action against national governments and companies that were causing environmental problems, but Greenpeace was and remains a Northern-based organisation with a strongly centralised structure. Furthermore, it prefers to frame its campaigns in moral rather than ideological ways, and so has not been associated strongly with the new Global Justice movement. Other groups such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predated the new environmentalism but have adjusted to it to some degree, becoming in recent years advocates of sustainable development and tackling poverty as the best means to protect non-human nature (see Rootes, this issue). Nevertheless while the character of WWF does vary a little between countries, overall it is not a radical organisation either in the sense of engaging in regular protest, or in making arguments that challenge the political order. Of the three major international environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) only Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) has associated itself with the critique of neoliberalism and aligned itself with the global justice movement. But despite having member groups in seventy countries, FoEI has few financial resources compared to Greenpeace or WWF (see Doherty, this issue) and in that sense its international organisation is small relative to the others.

Prior to the late 1990s, most national environmental organisations lacked either the money or the time to be able to engage in consistent international activity. However, there is evidence that transnational environmental action is on the increase. According to Bandy and Smith (2005), in 1973 there were 17 transnational social movement organisations (TSMOs) in the environmental field, whereas in 2000 that figure had risen to 167. Environmental groups made up 17% of all TSMOs, second only to human rights groups at 26% (Bandy & Smith, 2005: 16). Alongside this quantitative increase, which in part reflects the institutionalisation of environmentalism in the spread of formal organisations, there were also changes in environmental agendas. There is an increased ‘tendency for groups to adopt multi-issue rather than single issue frames for their struggles and groups were more likely to identify the linkages between issues such as between environmental protection and human rights …’ (Bandy & Smith, 2005: 16). Smith's (2005) research on the spread of regional organisation in transnational social movements since the 1980s showed that groups in the South were more likely to retain ties with groups outside their regions than those in the North and valued being part of transnational networks. While, as Smith acknowledges and as we discuss below (see Doyle, 2005; Wood, 2005; also both Doherty and Routledge, this issue), there are many ideological and organisational tensions between Northern and Southern groups involved in transnational alliances, Southern groups in Smith's survey were positive about the benefits of transnational alliances, because they provided them with resources and legitimacy. The cases of Madagascar, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary analysed in this issue (see Duffy, Fagan and Kerényi and Szabó) reveal how transnational alliances and rent-seeking behaviour can lead to organisations which are structured to meet the expectations of western funders. This may be an important extra part of the explanation for Smith's findings on the growth of transnational networks. It is not surprising that it is in the more radical networks such as People's Global Action (PGA; Wood, 2005; Routledge, this issue) and FoEI that the internal power relations within the networks have been addressed most selfconsciously, although without pretending that these can be fully surmounted. Thus, in examining the growth of TSMOs we need to be aware of the financial dependence on transnational funding of most environmental organisations outside the wealthiest countries.

The growth of protest against global neoliberalism has been the most important impetus for new attention to transnational environmental politics. Prior to the 1990s the focus on global civil society in international relations was on the role of formally organised NGOs in policy-making as there was little transnational protest witnessed. When major transnational protests against the ‘Washington Consensus’ and neoliberalism began in the late 1990s, however, this changed because these protests were new in important respects. There is a long history of transnational protest going back to the anti-slavery movements of the early nineteenth century, but these were still rooted in national politics. Tarrow and della Porta (2005) argue that transnational politics took three forms. First, diffusion of ideas or actions from one country to another, as for instance in the way that sit-ins spread from the US Civil Rights Movement to European student movements in the 1960s; second, the domestication within national politics of conflicts that had external origins, such as protests against national governments for accepting structural adjustment programmes imposed by international financial institutions; and third, externalisation, in which external institutions were challenged to intervene in domestic affairs, as in the advocacy coalitions through which Brazilian rubber tappers and NGOs worked with Northern environmental groups and put pressure on the World Bank to hold the Brazilian government to account for development projects in the Amazonian rainforests (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). What is new in the recent and diverse multi-national protests against neoliberalism is that these protests target transnational institutions (including, but not limited to, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) through coordinated transnational protests. Thus, new transnational global justice networks of protest movements and social forums have been inspired by the evidence about unaccountable and unjust transnational sites of power. They are also facilitated by two further developments: first, the break up of the USSR has removed the tendency to see all post-1945 conflicts in bi-polar terms; and second, cheaper communications in the form of telephone, fax, the internet and email, have transformed the ease of transnational exchange of information and coordination of action. Also vital has been the reduced cost of air travel in facilitating face-to-face networking. While it is an uncomfortable truth for environmentalists given the contribution of air travel to CO₂ emissions, face-to-face networking is vital to effective transnational campaigning, as it is through sustained presence that the deeper relationships of trust and solidarity are most likely to develop. This was evident in the negotiation of a crisis of identity by key figures in FoEI (see Doherty, this issue), and also allows cosmopolitan activists to cross borders regularly to engage in the kind of ‘imagineering’ work that Routledge, Nativel and Cumbers (this issue) identify as essential for grassroots global justice networks.

This is not, however, a book about the globalisation of environmentalism. There is no evidence of a single form of environmental movement emerging, nor of national borders becoming irrelevant. The analysis in this collection is linked by a concern with three questions raised about environmental movements in connection with new and older transnational forms of power. First, how do inequalities, including the legacy of colonialism, affect the context in which environmental movements work? This affects the power relations within transnational social movement networks (such as FoEI and PGA Asia) and the governance networks that shape the opportunities available to environmental NGOs as in Madagascar and Bosnia. Second, how do different parts of national environmental movements engage with transnational institutions and what is the relationship between national bases of operation and transnational action? This is the focus of the contributions on Hungary, Britain and France. Third, in what ways do national and other borders remain significant? In respect of this question it is salutary to compare environmentalism in Iran and Burma (see Doyle & Simpson, this volume) with other cases examined in this collection. In Iran the Islamic government, as a means of improving environmental governance, has encouraged environmental NGOs, but they are not permitted to work as political groups in any way that might challenge the regime. When Iran held a major international environmental conference in 2005 it did not invite any NGOs from Iran or abroad in case they asked questions that the regime did not want to answer. In Burma the military regime has exploited its gas reserves at the expense of violent repression of ethnic and religious minorities. Resistance groups among the Karen peoples have developed the concept of ‘earth rights’ to describe how environmental and human rights are both being repressed. Environmentalism has crossed the borders of both countries, but the borders matter, regime types matter, and radical green ideas in both countries are accessible mainly through satellite broadcasts and websites run by dissident exiles.

Mignolo (2000) has coined the term ‘border thinking’ to describe how borders of various kinds, both national and social are altered by the transnational changes that we identified above. It is not that national borders disappear as transnational sites of power become more significant, but rather that they gain a new meaning in an era of increased transnational flows of people, finance and communications. The article on France by Hayes illustrates this well. Environmental protest in France has taken a novel turn to civil disobedience, following forms of protest that were common a few years earlier in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Yet, rather than direct diffusion from other countries which is, as Hayes says, probably minimal, what matters most in France is how these forms of protest were redefined in French Republican terms. Thus destroying GM crops is for Jose Bové , the internationally famous leader of the Confédé ration paysanne (CP), a form of ‘civic’, as opposed to civil, disobedience. He frames this citizenship as a call on the national state to protect aspects of French culture, in which food and its production loom large, against the flattening forces of neoliberalism by standing up to the World Trade Organisation and refusing to grow or import genetically modified (GM) products. Transnational political forces were at issue in this case but they were not unchanged by crossing borders. Thus we still need comparative national analyses, because even when environmental movements in different countries are subject to the same global forces, they do not all react in the same way. In this issue comparisons between Bosnia and Madagascar show that in both cases transnational networks of governance have imposed environmental policies based on mistaken assumptions about the weakness of local civil society, but also that each differs because of nationally specific conditions.

Given the unevenness of environmental movements, differences between movements and the importance of power relations between them, we are cautious about the use of the terminology ‘global civil society’ to describe the transnational networks developing between environmental groups. This is partly on historic grounds, as it is well known that even if there are new forms of transnational power, anti-colonial and post-colonial movements have always worked transnationally. The anti-apartheid movement (AAM) is a good example of a movement that crossed borders, even while South Africa was a closed society for most of its population (Thörn, 2006). The AAM began in the early 1960s before the emergence of the New Left, to which some trace the origins of the Northern movements in the new transnational contention. The better accounts of global civil society include recognition of this long historic context (Edwards & Gaventa, 2001; Keane, 2003). However, to us, global civil society still suggests a stronger and abstracted unity than seems to be evident given the differences within and the limits, as yet, of transnational environmentalism. We prefer the term used by Torgerson in his article in this collection (see also Torgerson, 1999) – the green public sphere. The key point about the public sphere is that it is a space of dialogue and debate and does not presuppose a unified movement or society simply in need of a single common strategy. One point of criticism of the concept of public sphere is that its Republican origins seem to privilege the abstract public citizen, disembodied from bodily characteristics or historic influences (Marion Young, 2002). Torgerson, however, like Nancy Fraser (1990), argues that public spheres can be multiple rather than a single transnational space. Thus, in his article in this issue, he identifies a post-colonial dimension to environmentalism which needs to be addressed within the public spheres that are constituted by debates between environmentalists across borders. This is a theme we will return to below. Next, however, we need to explain what we mean by the terms environmental movement and social movement. How these terms are defined theoretically is important for the task of explaining the differences between different kinds of environmental movement.

The Social Movement in Environmental Movements

The concept of social movement is an analytical construct, not a description of a given empirical phenomenon. There is no clear consensus on how to use the term and so at best the criteria that various definitions set out provide a heuristic device, which we argue can be used as a Weberian ideal type to understand and interpret real cases. This means that we should not accept at face value that all groups that call themselves environmental are necessarily part of a single environmental social movement.

We identify four elements characteristic of social movements. First, a movement must have some common identity which is not based simply on ideas, but also expressed in the-taken-for-granted practices and culture developed over time by participants in collective action (what Bourdieu calls its ‘habitus’). Social movements in this sense are not momentary coalitions but develop their collective identity over time, as they face the question of defining ‘who are we?’, ‘what do we believe?’ and ‘how should we act?’. A second feature of social movements is that we can assess who is in the movement empirically by assessing its network ties as opposed to membership of organisations. Put most straightforwardly, movement involvement requires regular interaction with others. Mapping this through network ties can show which groups and individuals take common action or exchange ideas or resources. This means that we can also distinguish between more or less active and central and peripheral actors in the movement. A focus on networks also means that there is no type of organisation that defines a social movement. Movement organisations can be hierarchical and centralised, or the opposite. Or, as in the environmental movement, and the transnational networks examined by Routledge et al., they can be a combination of both. A third feature is that parts of this movement network are involved in public protest, which we regard as essential to the public political dimension of movement action,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Environmental Politics/Routledge Research in Environmental Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern Environmentalisms
• 2. Expanding the Green Public Sphere: Post-colonial Connections
• 3. Non-governmental Organisations and Governance States: The Impact of Transnational Environmental Management Networks in Madagascar
• 4. Traversing more than Speed Bumps: Green Politics under Authoritarian Regimes in Burma and Iran
• 5. Facing South? British Environmental Movement Organisations and the Challenge of Globalisation
• 6. Neither ‘North’ nor ‘South’: The Environment and Civil Society in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina
• 7. Transnational Influences on Patterns of Mobilisation Within Environmental Movements in Hungary
• 8. Vulnerability and Disobedience: New Repertoires in French Environmental Protests
• 9. Entangled Logics and Grassroots Imaginaries of Global Justice Networks
• 10. Friends of the Earth International: Negotiating a Transnational Identity
• 11. Green Public Spheres and the Green Governance State: the Politics of Emancipation and Ecological Conditionality
• Index