and Scoones, 2005). Mobilizations must galvanize creative, knowledgeable citizens,
and must operate in an increasingly interconnected knowledge society where forms
of democratic politics are being reconstituted.
Yet how might such multiple, diverse, fragmented mobilizations add up to and
contribute to the bigger challenges of green transformation? Scaling up and out
through networking and alliance-building can be key but, as we have shown, there
are dangers if this comes at the expense of the critical edge and locatedness in context
that gave life to mobilization in the first place. Indeed, we have highlighted tensions
along an axis from movement through network to institutionalization, inter -
connected with those from local particularism to wider, including global, concerns.
The cases show how these tensions can be navigated in a variety of ways, depending
not just on context but on varied analyses of power. Thus a structural political
economy analysis, as adopted, for example, by strands of the food sovereignty and
anti-GM movements, underlines a logic of alliance-building to confront capitalist
corporate and state power. Yet a more ‘capillary’ notion that locates power in diffuse
social relations, informs other efforts to reclaim democracy through micro-social
practices and negotiations in multiple spaces. Even mobilizations that appear to
withdraw from or ignore the centres of power can be viewed as transformatory
in their potential to advance alternatives, and overturn stereotypes and traditions,
and reframe ideas and practice into more participatory and negotiable models.
The potential of green movements to contribute to the politics of green
transformations, then, lies in their analyses (whether overt or implicit), as well as
their action. By embodying particular theories of power and deploying these in
diverse political strategies, they contribute to a vital opening up of the politics
of sustainability, which must increasingly be concerned not just with the allocation
of material resources, ecological space, status and authority, but with who defines
the future and what perspectives and experiences matter. This involves cultivating
a wider breadth of knowledge and experience to define goals and appropriate ways
of reaching them, enabling the diversity that is required to respect diverse ecological
and social contexts, and to keep options open in the face of the unexpected. It is
by continuously offering alternatives and maintaining a critically-aware position of
the inevitable movement-institutionalization and local-global tensions that affect
their operation, that green mobilizations offer their greatest potential to inspire the
kind of thinking and action that green transformations require.
Notes
1 Available online at: www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/
jun/17/la-via-campesina-food-sovereignty. Accessed 20 June 2014.
2 The Nyeleni declaration was produced in 2007 in Nyeleni, a village in Mali. Available
online at: www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290. Accessed 20 June 2014.
3 Available online at: www.future-agricultures.org/blog/entry/missing-politics-and-foodsovereignty#.U4NI2E1OXIU. Accessed 20 June 2014.
Mobilizing for green transformations 133
and must operate in an increasingly interconnected knowledge society where forms
of democratic politics are being reconstituted.
Yet how might such multiple, diverse, fragmented mobilizations add up to and
contribute to the bigger challenges of green transformation? Scaling up and out
through networking and alliance-building can be key but, as we have shown, there
are dangers if this comes at the expense of the critical edge and locatedness in context
that gave life to mobilization in the first place. Indeed, we have highlighted tensions
along an axis from movement through network to institutionalization, inter -
connected with those from local particularism to wider, including global, concerns.
The cases show how these tensions can be navigated in a variety of ways, depending
not just on context but on varied analyses of power. Thus a structural political
economy analysis, as adopted, for example, by strands of the food sovereignty and
anti-GM movements, underlines a logic of alliance-building to confront capitalist
corporate and state power. Yet a more ‘capillary’ notion that locates power in diffuse
social relations, informs other efforts to reclaim democracy through micro-social
practices and negotiations in multiple spaces. Even mobilizations that appear to
withdraw from or ignore the centres of power can be viewed as transformatory
in their potential to advance alternatives, and overturn stereotypes and traditions,
and reframe ideas and practice into more participatory and negotiable models.
The potential of green movements to contribute to the politics of green
transformations, then, lies in their analyses (whether overt or implicit), as well as
their action. By embodying particular theories of power and deploying these in
diverse political strategies, they contribute to a vital opening up of the politics
of sustainability, which must increasingly be concerned not just with the allocation
of material resources, ecological space, status and authority, but with who defines
the future and what perspectives and experiences matter. This involves cultivating
a wider breadth of knowledge and experience to define goals and appropriate ways
of reaching them, enabling the diversity that is required to respect diverse ecological
and social contexts, and to keep options open in the face of the unexpected. It is
by continuously offering alternatives and maintaining a critically-aware position of
the inevitable movement-institutionalization and local-global tensions that affect
their operation, that green mobilizations offer their greatest potential to inspire the
kind of thinking and action that green transformations require.
Notes
1 Available online at: www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/
jun/17/la-via-campesina-food-sovereignty. Accessed 20 June 2014.
2 The Nyeleni declaration was produced in 2007 in Nyeleni, a village in Mali. Available
online at: www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290. Accessed 20 June 2014.
3 Available online at: www.future-agricultures.org/blog/entry/missing-politics-and-foodsovereignty#.U4NI2E1OXIU. Accessed 20 June 2014.
Mobilizing for green transformations 133