Green Movements

Green Movements Defined?

The diversity of stances on green movements makes a unitary definition problematic. For present purposes, however, green movements are collective actors engaged simultaneously in conflictual contestation and cooperative capacity building informed by ecological and environmental paradigms. The conflictual spheres engaged with are diverse, including economics, formal politics, social relations, culture, gender, science, and technology in relation to the organic realm most frequently referred to as nature. The primary issue focus of a movement combined with its prioritised mode of engagement result in a highly differentiated green movement milieu. This has been theorised as a number of discrete single issue movements engaged in specific conflicts and as a network of networks (Melucci 1996). The notion of a network of networks provides a means of articulating the diversity of movements engaged within a domain where cooperative capacity-building activities take place. Capacity building here is understood as the cumulative potential of green movements to define, formalise, and mobilise social force around ecologically and environmentally defined stakes within specific spheres of engagement. This is a historically constituted process incorporating sources of green critique formalised and engaged with since the nineteenth century and earlier (Wall 1994).

An Anatomy of Green Movements

Green movements became theoretically important as one of the “new” collective actors to emerge from the constellation of protest movements of the 1960s with theoretical implications for approaches towards transformative social actors. Throughout the 1970s, green movements assumed a variety of forms, including formal political parties seeking electoral recognition such as the U.K. Green Party and Germany's Die Grunnen; mass membership campaigning organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth usually known as social movement organisations (SMOs); and more loosely organised movements lacking formal membership structures like the 1970s antinuclear movements. In advanced industrial societies, these movements coexisted with long established organisations focussed on “conservation” of the “natural environment” by intervening through formal channels such as planning inquiries and political lobbying (McNaghten and Urry 1998). Green movements marked a shift to a wider range of interventions, including the pursuit of media coverage, often utilising direct action to heighten the profile of “green” concerns within the public sphere. Significant cleavages shaping the green movement milieu included debates between those advocating alternative trajectories, for example, alternative technology and those emphasising the need for more fundamental changes in consciousness, values, and the economic order. Gender represented a further significant divide, with the eco-feminist movement emphasising the centrality of patriarchal political, economic, scientific, and military institutions in subordinating and exploiting both the “natural” and social order.

[Page 346]Throughout the 1980s, the consolidation of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom and United States coincided with the inclusion of prominent environmental issues, particularly climate change, within the global political arena. Following the demise of Soviet communism, green movements were identified as the most significant ideological challenge to the resultant neoliberal orthodoxy. The UN-sponsored Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which endorsed sustainable development, biodiversity, and rain forest protocols, has been theorised by Maarten Hajer in terms of the ascendancy of the green agenda, marking a transition to ecological modernisation and as the global capture of the green movement and the influential “think global, act local” philosophy by Klaus Eder. The subordination of the measures adopted at Rio to economic global regulatory regimes pursued through the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and consolidated through the successor organisation, the World Trade Organization (WTO), became prominent within a more globally engaged green movement increasingly aware of connections between environmental and social justice (Harvey 1996) through increasing links with indigenous peoples’ movements in the developing world and the engagement of people of colour with environmental issues, particularly toxic waste disposal in the United States.

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