Acting Locally: Local Environmental Mobilizations and Campaigns(Environmental Politics)

Local campaigns are the most persistent and ubiquitous forms of environmental contention. National and transnational mobilisations come and go and the attention they receive from mass media ebbs and flows, but local campaigns persist. The persistence or re-emergence of local campaigns is also a reminder that it remain possible to mobilise people around environmental issues, and they have often served as sources of innovation in and re-invigoration of national organisations that have allegedly been co-opted by the powerful and incorporated into the established political and administrative system. But local environmental campaigns have been relatively neglected in the scientific literature. Drawing on examples from Britain, France, Greece, Ireland and Italy, this book seeks to redress that neglect by examining the networks among actors and organisations that connect local mobilizations to the larger environmental movement and political systems, the ways in which local disputes are framed in order to connect with national and global issues, and the persistent impacts of the peculiarities of place upon environmental campaigns. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Politics

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Local Environmental Mobilizations 2. Still the Time of Environmental Movements? Environmental Organizational Fields in Britain and Italy 3. Local Contention, Global Framing: The Protest Campaigns against the TAV in Val de Susa and the Bridge on the Messina Straits 4. From Larzac to the Altermondialist Mobilization: Space in Environmental Movements 5. Networking the Local and the National: Environmental Activists and Campaigns in London 6. Local Environmental Protest in Greece 7. Environmental Direct Action Protests in Manchester, Oxford and North Wales 8. Resisting the Costs of ‘Development’: Local Environmental Activism in Ireland 9. Conclusion: Local Environmental Mobilisations in Context

About the Author :
Christopher Rootes is Professor of Environmental Politics and Political Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Review :
'This is a very interesting volume that will be useful to researchers and students of social movements, particularly environmental mobilizations and campaigns.' - Social Movement Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 92, January 2010