PI: Ruth Reitan Co-PI: Shannon Gibson Institution: University of Miami
This study will identify and explain "waves of radicalization" within and by transnational environmental networks targeting the United Nations climate change negotiations from 1995-2010. Data will be gathered through semi-structured interviews at various global activist demonstrations and through a longitudinal, protest event and discourse analysis. The results of this study will contribute to sociology, comparative politics, and international relations, and to the more specific study of transnational social movements and contentious politics.
Broader Impacts This project seeks to advance an understanding of the individual, social, and structural factors that shift collective protest and claims making toward more radical stances. Additionally, this project will study the most marginalized sector of the environmental movement - the Global South. This research will be conducted in South America, Africa, and Asia in order to include Southern perspectives on global mobilization against ecological degradation, particularly from indigenous peoples and landless workers movements.
Summary of Findings How and why climate activists targeting the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations have radicalized in the last five years and determining the effect(s) this radicalization has had on future mobilizations and the climate governance regime broadly, is the primary focus of this dissertation. The findings from this project are summarized below. Findings 1: Cycles of Climate Protest In total, a newspaper-based protest event analysis yielded 86 protest events occurring during the annual UNFCCC climate negotiations from 2006 – 2010. These events were coded to reflect the event’s specific details and to classify their discourses and tactics as either contained, transgressive or hybrid. Overwhelmingly, the analysis supports the claim that the climate activist mobilizations at COP15 in Copenhagen were the largest, most diverse and ultimately disruptive mass demonstrations the UNFCCC had ever experienced. Beyond this though, are a number of other unique findings with regard to the ebbing and flowing of transgressive vs. contained discourse and action. From COPs12 to 16, the majority of events involved contained discourses (65%), followed by transgressive (23%) then hybrid (events featuring both contained and transgressive discourses; 9%). Likewise, tactics were primarily contained (63%) versus transgressive (37%). Yet when comparing variations in tactics and discourse over time, two spikes are notable. First, in 2007 at COP13 in Bali there is a 400% increase in transgressive actions compared to the previous year and a 200% increase in hybrid discourses (i.e., combining radical and reformist demands). Next, in 2009 at COP15, following a protest lull at COP14, there is a 360% increase in transgressive actions over COP13 and an 800% increase in hybrid/transgressive discourses (numbers combined) employed in actions compared to COP13. Thus there is evidence of two "upswings" in transgressive protest in 2007 and 2009. Additionally, initial discursive escalation is noted at COP13 by new protests with hybrid demands against market mechanisms (9%) and calls for democracy (5%) as well as protest events targeting other NGOs (5%) and the UNFCCC (5%). At COP15, discursive escalation is even more pronounced with events increasingly protesting businesses (22%) and the UNFCCC (19%) and demanding the exclusion of market mechanisms(12%) and calling for broad-based system change (28%) as opposed to climate-specific solutions. Likewise, tactical escalation is noted at COP15 due to a variety of tactics, namely trespassing (16%), disruption (16%), occupation (3%), police engagement (3%), arson (2%), hunger strike (2%), and so on. This sequencing suggests that discursive escalation precedes tactical escalation. Findings 2: Explaining the Dynamics of Activist Radicalization Through participatory action research (PAR), specifically 20 interviews and observation at 84 mobilization events and protests, this dissertation finds that activists differentially responded to broad change processes relating to climate change and its governance, sometimes attributing them as opportunities and other times as threats. They are as follows: - given differential attribution of opportunity and threat, competition arises amongst climate activists over access, resources and policy preferences; - a recognition of the need to ‘radicalize’ by insider activists is fueled by lack of progress and civil society access within the institutional settings of the UNFCCC; - this recognition is further spread via diffusion of information and claims through existing relationships among insider activists and brokerage of information and claims to new actors such as spillover activists from the alterglobalization movement; - through diffusion and brokerage, several framing processes, namely frame bridging and frame amplification, develop to align multiple frames such as deep, social, political and Indigenous ecological discourses on climate change to create a broader meta-frame of "climate justice"; - via this newly constructed meta-frame, discursive escalation occurs as activists shift their objects and claims toward critiques of established environmental advocacy networks, the UNFCCC as institution, neoliberal globalization and "green capitalism"; - as frames align around radical environmental discourses, broad-based solidarity – support for others’ causes and tactics – between sympathetic insider and radical outsider activists is achieved; - this solidarity helps to overcome collective action problems for costly action by providing resources and support for risky, tactical escalation, thus leading to radicalization; - finally, radicalization does not end here. Indeed it is part of a broader opportunity/threat spiral which consistently cycles back upon itself. Findings 3: The Outcomes of Radicalization This study finds that there are multiple response to and outcomes of radicalization. This interplay is largely mediated through differential attribution of threat and opportunity by both institutional and non-state actors. First, following radicalization, there are four potential responses that states, institutions and even NGOs may pursue against others. They are repression, decertification, cooptation and certification. Given activists’ collective attribution of opportunity or threat, three results may occur: radicalization, institutionalization, or demobilization.
