Sustainability Politics Exam 2
Lecture 7
Lecture 8
Lecture 9
Lecture 10
Lecture 11
Lecture 12
Lecture 7 – Social Movements and Sustainability: National anti-nuclear movements, ca.
1980; social movements, globalization and the EU ca. 2000
Four waves of social movements
-cycle emergence and performance
-peak every 60 years
-shaped by zeitgeist/ cultural climate = specific configuration of worldviews, emotions,
ideas, beliefs at particular point in time
-creates sensitivity to certain things, cultural critique (optimistically inclined or
pessimistically) – changes over time and has relation to economic (Kondratiev) cycles
How do changes in social-cultural-economic conditions shape emergence, degree of
mobilization of social movements?
Three explanations of the emergence of NSM in 1970s
1) Resource Mobilization Approach
2) New Social Movements Approach
,3) Political Opportunity Structure Approach
New Social movements differ from old
1 Post-materialistic values; about life quality
2 recruited from middle class; not certain class divisions
3 Politicize everyday life
4 use unconventional politics (around political ways)
5 shared opposition against ‘the system’
6 decentralized, participatory and autonomous organization
7 not a new grand narrative, pluralist culture
1) Resource Mobilization Approach
-pluralist tradition
-social movement = set of opinions and beleifs in a population which represent preferences
for changing some elements of social structure and or reward distribution
-social movement organization = a complex, or formal organization which identitifies
preferences with social movement or a counter-movement and attempts to implement those
goals
-focus on SMOs
-how do they recruit members, how important are leaders, what resources do they draw on
-what impacts do they achieve?
-SMOs key to SM impacts; mobilizing and coordinating social movement acitivity (structure
of organization is important) – tightly knit social movement, well connected through
infrastructure of national and international networks
,Two critiques of RMT
1 from neo-pluralists (Kitschelt)
-too narrow focus on internal variables of SM, need to explore external structure
2 from neo-marxists (Steinmitz)
-fails to understand deeper nature of conflicts, and nature of grievances
-ignores the relationshop between evolving social conflicts and identities
-underrate symbolic, expressive moral apsects, overemphasize rational choice
2) New Social Movements Approach
-Steinmitz
-neo-Marxism
-7 characteristics of NSM
-NSM pose problems for traditional Marxism, cannot be explained fully by neo-Marxism,
regulation theory of Jessop best to explain
-middle class in NSM overrepresented, but not because it is only about their interests
-e.g. smog is democratic
-regulation theory, capital accumulation system, reinforces itself, stabilized over time
-Fordism as examample of regulation, crisis of Fordism due to oil crisis or early
modernization (better education, resistance to homogenous culture and enforced conformism)
-Hirsh and Roth on regulation theory; conflate theorizing with explaining
-Jessop regulation theory; maintains Marxist theory core (capital accumulation) but explains
specific phenomena, history determines the current, contingency
, 3) The Political Opportunity Structure
-neo-pluralist
-Kitschelt
-comparative research on 4 countries and anti-nuclear movement in 1960-1970
-differ in their POS, same in NSM characteristics
-POS can explain movement impacts and strategies
-POS have two dimensions; openness and capacity
-Openness; number of political parties, groups with demands, capacity of legislator to make
policy decisions without executive, mechanisms of aggregation patterns of intermediation
between interests groups and executive branch
-capacity; centralization of state apparatus, govn. Control over market, independency of
judiciary
-POS can explain different impacts and strategies;
Three kinds of impacts
1 procedural impacts – grant access to social movements demands, recognition of SM as
legitimate
2 structural impacts – change the structures and rules of a political system as a consequence
of SMs
3 substantive impacts – policy changes brought about by SMs
The international POS of transnational environmental movements
-around 1990s; environmental movement organizations (EMOs) created global networks, and
internet and ICT society, fostered the creation of transnational environmental networks
