The environmental movement was the most influential social movement of the twentieth century (Rootes 2007a) and continues to have a substantial impact upon contemporary Australian life—not only on the nation’s environment but also socially, economically and politically. Yet, in 2012, when Australian Greens Members of Parliament described tensions within their party as ‘growing pains’ (Kerr 2012), they could have been referring to the environmental movement as a whole. At the 2010 federal election, the Greens secured nine seats in the Senate, and a crucial lower house seat in a hung parliament, and their political influence increased considerably. Since then, however, public scrutiny of Greens policies has intensified and internal divisions have been widely aired. In 2017, Australia’s most prominent environmental activist and former party leader Bob Brown publicly attacked New South Wales Senator Lee Rhiannon, urging her to resign to enable a generational changing of the guard and boost the Greens ’ electoral support in New South Wales (Gartrell 2017).
The new decade also witnessed a period of intense disruption in one of Australia’s largest environmental organisations. In 2010, a high-profile leadership struggle erupted within The Wilderness Society (TWS) when long-term National Director Alec Marr was usurped in a ‘palace coup’. The resulting leadership change followed a petition by 144 TWS staff members that exposed intergenerational divisions over movement agendas (Fyfe 2010). In the birthplace of TWS, the island state of Tasmania , tensions in the movement were also evident in a decision by direct action environmental groups to defy requests from mainstream environmental organisations, government and industry to stop their media-focused protests and support roundtable negotiations with industry and government to end environmental conflict in the forests.
These examples highlight a major challenge for researchers seeking to explain how environmental threats and conflicts are publicly articulated. In a social movement where the very notion of leadership is sometimes contested and often hidden, how are we to understand the role of environmental leaders in shaping political and public-issue agendas? Why are some leaders more influential than others? How do the sometimes conflicting interests of environmental organisation leaders, Greens politicians and environmental protest groups influence the way environmental concerns are negotiated? How do leaders interact with still-emerging forms of new media in constructing environmental issues and how does generational change among leaders affect the way those concerns are acted upon? We explore the basis of environmental leadership , how leadership is understood by environmentalists, and how it has changed over time. In addressing these questions, we hope to provide new evidence-based understandings of the people and processes driving public debate on Australia’s environmental future.
Environmental Leaders
While the sociological literature on environmental-movement organisations and the structure of social movements is extensive, the very notion of environmental leaders has been a contested topic that goes against the grain for many environmental activists (Barker et al. 2001, p. 2). This is partly because the notion of leadership does not sit well with the principles of consensus decision-making, often claimed to be a central tenet of new social movements (Dalton et al. 1990). In contrast to formal, hierarchical organisations, social movements are ‘loosely connected groups, social circles and networks’, according to Pakulski (1991, p. 43), while Diani (1992, p. 13) emphasises the ‘informal interactions, between a plurality of individuals, groups or associations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared identity’. Similarly, Rootes (2007a, p. 610) defines an environmental movement ‘as a loose, noninstitutionalized network of informal interactions that may include, as well as individuals and groups who have no organizational affiliation, organizations of varying degrees of formality’. This loose structure tends to result in less formalised leadership that lacks the authority of formal organisations, although there are exceptions, such as the hierarchically organised environmental organisation Greenpeace (Diani and Donati 1999, p. 19). In an ideal-typical sense at least, movements tend towards participatory decision-making based upon consensus (Dalton et al. 1990; Dalton 1996), and tend to be non-hierarchical and non-bureaucratic in structure (Doyle and McEachern 2001).
Yet, social movements do have leaders. Leaders ‘inspire commitment, mobilise resources, create and recognise opportunities, devise strategies, frame demands and influence outcomes’, and they have strategic ‘connections to elites in other sectors such as political parties, unions, and mass media’ (Morris and Staggenborg 2004, pp. 171, 188). The claim that social-movement leaders are ‘strategic decision-makers who inspire and organise others to participate’ (Morris and Staggenborg 2004, p. 171) provides a useful working definition of leaders for our research. Social-movement leaders tend to employ impression-management techniques (Bass 1985; Gardner and Avolio 1998) and strategies to mobilise public opinion on environmental issues, from non-violent protests to social media campaigns and conventional lobbying of governments.
While scholarship on social movement leaders per se is relatively rare, academic research on environmental leaders is an underdeveloped field, particularly in Australia. Doyle (2000, p. 161) described what he termed an ‘elite network’ of activists operating in the Queensland wet-tropics campaign in the mid 1980s. Members of this ‘elite ’ were not volunteers but ‘professional activists’ employed by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) or TWS (or with links to both organisations), and were located in Canberra , Sydney , Melbourne or Hobart (where TWS first emerged). Doyle claimed that this agenda-setting core group of activists who controlled decision-making were ‘a small band of professional, organisational activists banded together to dominate many conservation initiatives. As such elites increase their hold on movement politics, representativeness and equality in decision-making diminish’ (Doyle 2000, p. 11). For Doyle, this dominant group of activists:
was not necessarily the result of a conscious bid for power but a consequence of their attempts to play the political game as defined for them by party-political and government agendas … Due to the key positions of power this national elite held, they were able to convince the politicians, the media and the general public that their actions reflected the wishes of the movement in general. (Doyle 2000, p. 161)
Nor did the actions of these powerful activists represent the broader environmental movement (Doyle 2000, p. 161). Yet, for elite theorists such as Robert Putnam (1976, p. 4), an elite consists of leaders who have power over subordinates, a relatively small number of people who are able to make strategic decisions within hierarchically structured organisations. In other words, ‘persons with power to affect organisational outcomes individually, regularly and seriously’ (Higley et al. 1979, p. 3). Power in this context is ‘the ability to make rewards and threats that are likely to alter the motivations and conduct of persons other than the power-wielder’ (Higley et al. 1979, p. 3). Elite members are located at the top of large, complex organisations, with hierarchically organised structures, and their members are able to issue commands that subordinates are compelled to follow. In contrast, as Barker et al. (2001, p. 7) point out, social-movement leadership is ‘above all, an activity of persuasion’ rather than based upon power located in large organisations.
Within the sparse research on Australian environmental leaders , Tranter (1995) found a polycephalous (Gerlach and Hine 1970) form of leadership in the Tasmanian environmental movement in the early 1990s. He identified a variety of leadership roles, including spokespeople, organisers, experts, green politicians, image-makers and exemplary figures, with a large degree of role-sharing between leaders. Unlike government or business elites , he found ‘leaders of Tasmanian EMOs have limited formal authority over their followers as their organisations are structured in a non-bureaucratic and non-hierarchical manner’ (Tranter 2009, p. 720). In follow-up research based upon interviews with influential Tasmanian environmental activists conducted early in the new millennium, Tranter (2009, p. 720) argued:
EMO leaders exert a subtle form of influence over other movement participants stemming from the respect they have gained through long involvement in successful campaigns. Yet because they have influence rather than authority even if leaders attempt to ‘lead’, other activists and supporters are not compelled to follow […] A range of views and approaches to environmental problems almost inevitably arise in social movements, as with their non-hierarchical structure they lack an overarching form of leadership.
Tasmanian environmental leaders became influential through lengthy participation as environmental activists in semi-formal and informal networks, with leadership often based upon issue expertise. Leaders exert influence rather than power, with functional roles as spokespeople, organisers or experts often overlapping (Tranter 2009, 1995). Yet, what form does environmental leadership take in the Australian environmental movement more broadly, and how has this form of leadership changed over time as the movement has routinised, to become a more mainstream fixture of the political landscape (Pakulski et al. 1998)? Basic questions also underpin our research interest: who are the leaders of the Australian environmental movement and what roles do they play in the environmental movement?
We are particularly interested in how environmental leaders interact with various media, and how these symbiotically related actors (Lester 2007) negotiate the construction of environme...