Environmental movements, ecological modernisation and political opportunity structures

Abstract

During recent decades, environmental movements in First, Second and Third World countries have undergone far reaching changes. In western Europe and the United States they changed from radical grass‐roots groups striving for structural social reforms into highly institutionalised mass membership organisations, working within the neo‐liberal social order. In Eastern Europe and the former USSR, environmentalism flourished during the 1980s due to its articulation with national sovereignty claims but after 1989 the movement collapsed and now it lacks an institutional basis. In Third World countries, environmental groups are often torn between adaptation to western‐style patterns of development and resistance against the global neo‐liberal discourse. Ecological modernisation and sustainable development are both ways of dealing with environmental problems without fundamentally challenging the existing social order. Their applicability for environmental movements, however, is largely determined by political opportunity structures in individual countries.