This is an electronic version of an article published in Environmental PoliticsAbstract: Direct action campaigns against new roads in the UK received much attention, but campaign groups were locally organised and little is known about how they worked. Protests by three local environmental direct action groups in the years 1992-2001 are examined. Their repertoire was confrontational, targeted mainly at business and the state. Most protests were small-scale and most were unreported in either local or national media. In the larger groups, in Manchester and Oxford, most actions were carried out locally and direct action groups worked mainly alone. In the smaller Bangor group, campaigners sometimes needed alliances with less radical groups to campaign effectively, and travelled more to events outside their locality. Environmental direct action groups remain largely autonomous from strategic alliances, locally or nationally, and from efforts to influence state policy. Their protests are challenges to the norms underlying political and capitalist institutions rather than calculated attempts to influence government. Evidence that their actions, on issues such as road-building, genetic modification, global justice and climate change, were affecting public debate sustained and revitalised action more than did changes in political opportunities. The Environmental Direct Action Movement2

This article tracks workers' responses to redundancy and impact on the local labour market and regional unemployment policy after the closure of a large employer, Anglesey Aluminium (AA), on Anglesey in North Wales. It questions human capital theory (HCT) and its influence on sustaining neo-liberal policy orthodoxy -focused on supplying skilled and employable workers in isolation from other necessary ingredients in the policy recipe. It is concluded that HCT and associated skills policy orthodoxy are problematic because supply of particular skills did not create demand from employers. Ex-AA workers faced a paradox of being highly skilled but underemployed. Some workers re-trained but there were insufficient (quality) job opportunities. In picking up the pieces after redundancy many workers found themselves part of a labour 'precariat' with little choice but to 'make do and mend'.

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Abstract:Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires.

Genetic and other biotechnologies are starting to impact significantly upon society and individuals within it. Rose and Novas draw on an analysis of many patient groups to sketch out the broad notion of biocitizenship as a device for describing how the empowered and informed individual, group or network can engage with bioscience.