Grassroots Environmental Governance

Grassroots movements can pose serious challenges to both governments and corporations. However, grassroots actors possess a variety of motivations, and their visions of development may evolve in complex ways. Meanwhile, their relative powerlessness obliges them to forge an array of shifting alliances and to devise a range of adaptive strategies. Grassroots Environmental Governance presents a compilation of in-depth ethnographic case studies, based on original research. Each of the chapters focuses specifically on grassroots engagements with the agents of various forms of industrial development. The book is geographically diverse, including analyses of groups based in both the global North and South, and represents a range of disciplinary perspectives. This allows the collection to explore themes that cross-cut specific localities and disciplinary boundaries, and thus to generate important theoretical insights into the complexities of grassroots engagements with industry. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental activism, environmental governance, and environmental studies in general.

When international agreements fail to solve global problems like climate change, transnational networks attempt to address them by implementing "global ideas" -- policies and best practices negotiated at the global level-locally around the world. Grassroots Global Governance not only explains why some efforts succeed and others fail, but also why the process of implementing global ideas locally causes these ideas to evolve. Drawing on nodal governance theory, the book shows how transnational actors' success in putting global ideas into practice depends on the framing and network capacity-building strategies they use to activate networks of grassroots actors influential in local social and policy arenas. Grassroots actors neither accept nor reject global ideas as presented by outsiders. Instead, they negotiate whether and how to adapt them to fit local conditions. This contestation produces experimentation, and results in unique institutional applications of global ideas infused with local norms and practices. Grassroots actors ultimately guide this process due to their unique ability to provide the pressure needed to push the process forward. Experiments that endure are perceived as "successful," empowering those actors involved to activate transnational networks to scale up and diffuse innovative local governance models globally. These models carry local norms and practices to the international level where they challenge existing global approaches and stimulate new global governance institutions. By guiding the way global ideas evolve through local experimentation, grassroots actors reshape international actors' thinking, discourse, organizing, and the strategies they pursue globally. This makes them grassroots global governors. To demonstrate this, the book compares transnational efforts to implement local Integrated Watershed Management programs across Ecuador and shows how local experiments altered the global debate regarding sustainable development and stimulated a new global movement dedicated to changing the way sustainable development is practiced. In doing so, the book reveals the grassroots level as not merely the object of global governance, but rather a terrain where global governance is constructed.

Based on mixed-methods research and ethnographic fieldwork at various sites in Italy, this book examines the relationship between expertise and activism in grassroots environmentalism. Presenting interviews with citizens, activists and experts, it considers activism surrounding infrastructure in urban areas, in connection with water management, transport, tour- ism and waste disposal. Through comparisons between different political environments, the author analyses the ways in which citizens, political activists and technical experts participate in using expertise, shedding light on the effects of this on the structure and composition of social movements, as well as the implications for the mechanisms of participation and the formation of alliances. Bridging the sociology of expertise and contentious politics, this study of the relationship between contentious expertise and democratic accountability shows how conflict transforms, rather than inhibits, expertise production into a ‘contentious politics by other means’. As such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in social movements, environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Foreword by Maurice Strong, Under-Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Tackles one of the major debates in development - `bottom-up' development versus external aid UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development) is highly prestigious organisation Contains comprehensive case studies from across the developing world Hb has sold 975 copies since publication in August 1992

An inside look at how grassroots groups organize and develop strategies over seven years of participant observation in multiple organizations.

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.

The Nature of Hope focuses on the dynamics of environmental activism at the local level, examining the environmental and political cultures that emerge in the context of conflict. The book considers how ordinary people have coalesced to demand environmental justice and highlights the powerful role of intersectionality in shaping the on-the-ground dynamics of popular protest and social change. Through lively and accessible storytelling, The Nature of Hope reveals unsung and unstinting efforts to protect the physical environment and human health in the face of continuing economic growth and development and the failure of state and federal governments to deal adequately with the resulting degradation of air, water, and soils. In an age of environmental crisis, apathy, and deep-seated cynicism, these efforts suggest the dynamic power of a “politics of hope” to offer compelling models of resistance, regeneration, and resilience. The contributors frame their chapters around the drive for greater democracy and improved human and ecological health and demonstrate that local activism is essential to the preservation of democracy and the protection of the environment. The book also brings to light new styles of leadership and new structures for activist organizations, complicating assumptions about the environmental movement in the United States that have focused on particular leaders, agencies, thematic orientations, and human perceptions of nature. The critical implications that emerge from these stories about ecological activism are crucial to understanding the essential role that protecting the environment plays in sustaining the health of civil society. The Nature of Hope will be crucial reading for scholars interested in environmentalism and the mechanics of social movements and will engage historians, geographers, political scientists, grassroots activists, humanists, and social scientists alike.

This exploration of a key area of grassroots political concern examines environmental problems as social, not technical, problems, probing the conflicts that often arise between community residents and corporate/state structures over environmental issues.