Environmental Movement Organizations and Political Strategy

Abstract

The authors introduce the study of material-organizational dependencies into research on political differences in the environmental movement. Presently, the study of disparities in the environmental movement focuses on the ideological differences among major environmental groups to the exclusion of some very glaring discrepancies in the material-organizational context of these groups. The authors present a conceptual model of organizational differences among several U.S. environmental movement organizations to explain variation in their political behavior in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fight (1991-1993). The case of NAFTA offers a useful context given the volatility of environmental movement politics at the time, the range of issues forced to the surface in major groups, and the ultimate movement split that the politics over NAFTA engendered. It is evident that the split between pro-NAFTA and anti-NAFTA environmental groups stems in large part from substantial differences in both the ideological frames and material-organizational alliances formed among these groups.

Green politics or environmental blues? Analyzing ecological democracy

“…Such networks include anti-globalization social movements (e.g., anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests and the Chiapas rebellion), as well as localized struggles such as NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard). While this seems to refute arguments made earlier about ineffective mediating structures, social networks have helped to advance international awareness on socio-ecological challenges, recent or not (Dreiling and Wolf, 2001;Gills, 2000;Lipschutz and Mayer, 1996;Princen and Finger, 1994). The rapid rise in communication technologies has reached even the remotest corners of the globe, and brought the plights of isolated people to the media forefront.…”

Exploring the Strategic Inclinations of Japanese Environmental NPOs in Post-Fukushima Japan

“…To support our proposition, we draw on Dreiling and Wolf's [8] model of material-organizational dependencies versus ideological motivations of NPOs to develop a typology to identify which, if any, segments of environmental Japanese NPOs might pursue institutional entrepreneurial [16] opportunities in support of renewable energy policy. The Dreiling and Wolf model is based on the motivations for environmental organizations in the U.S. to either oppose or support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).…”

“…p. 43. More specifically, certain conservation and business groups stressed the importance of environmental and business issues complementing each other, while preservation and environmental justice groups saw the term "free trade" as code for destroying the environment in favor of profit [8].…”

“…Following the model developed by Dreiling and Wolf [8] for evaluating policy positions of environmental movement organizations in the U.S. based on their material dependencies (i.e., sources of income), their ties with corporate and political entities, and the ecological identities of the environmental nonprofits, the following contingency model evaluates Japanese environmental NPOs based on institutional embeddedness and ideological intensity. While the model of Dreiling and Wolf (2001) considers material dependence, ties, and ecological identities to evaluate a binary result of "anti-NAFTA" or "pro-NAFTA", the contingency model in Table 4 considers gradations of embeddedness and ideological intensity based on the six levels of oppositionality to nuclear energy identified by Academic A2 [7].…”

“…The methodology section includes an explanation of the qualitative and quantitative approaches utilized to develop background information about environmental Japanese NPOs and then quantitatively survey their attitudes about Japanese energy policy. We conclude with a discussion section in which Dreiling and Wolf]'s [8] material-organizational dependencies model is used to build a typology of Japanese environmental NPOs. We identify segments of Japanese NPOs based on the model and explain the strategic inclinations of these segments and the likelihood of a segment or segments to achieve at least incremental support for renewable energy.…”