This project will create a series of over time databases on national environmental organizations in Britain, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Each national database will contain information on individual environmental organizations' (1) demographics (e.g. founding date, membership, staffing levels), (2) membership structure, (3) activities, and (4) specific issues of environmental concern. Data collection is designed to ensure the assembly of reliable data in the most flexible manner possible, in order to facilitate future work by a wide variety of potential end-users including scholars, students, and those interested or working in for-profit, non-profit and public policy realms related to environmental and energy sustainability, natural resources, health, environmental justice, or wildlife.
The intellectual merit of database construction centers on developing a test of alternative social movement/interest group sequencing models. It is generally taken-for-granted that social movements/interest groups first develop locally and then nationally before transnational organizational infrastructures emerge. In contrast, scholars interested in globalization processes suggest a top-down model, where global culture has strong implications for a variety of processes within nations, including the development of domestic interest groups and national public policies.
The creation of a series of national databases on environmental organizations has broader impacts by contributing to infrastructures for research and education. Data assembled here will, for example, facilitate cross-national examination of environmental movements themselves and these movements' effects on national public policy. Research is tightly integrated with an upper-level research "capstone" course taught by the PI and organized around data assembly. Teaching, training and learning are advanced through participation of a large number of undergraduate research assistants in data collection.
