The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia

How do environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) continue their activism under conditions of increasingly authoritarian governance? In the 1990s, during the immediate post-Soviet period, Russian environmental organizations developed activist strategies in a period of political instability and economic recession. These strategies roughly corresponded to Hirschman’s ideal types of exit, voice, and loyalty. Since that time, many of the conditions that facilitated the creation of these organizational types have changed. Foreign funding for civil society development declined sharply, the government has embraced a more coercive approach to shaping social activism, and social media provide new platforms and resources for environmentalists. Following the passage of the 2012 Law on Foreign Agents, new forms of environmentalism in Russia emerged to adapt to and challenge the government’s effort to contract space for autonomous action. These activist strategies complicate Hirschman’s ideal types in ways that illuminate how environmentalism may endure under authoritarian regimes in Russia and beyond.

Governing gene editing in agriculture and food in the United States

Biotechnologies in agriculture and food are increasingly governed by both state and nonstate actors. In this article, we explore emerging tensions and contestations in the United States over how gene-editing technologies in agriculture and food should be governed and by whom. This article is framed theoretically by the literatures examining the politics of state and nonstate governance of the agrifood and biotechnology sectors. We draw on semistructured interviews with 45 key actors in the United States, including representatives of regulatory agencies, commodity groups, consumer and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), biotechnology and food industry, and scientists. In contrast to assumptions that commodity group and industry actors would share a preference for limited or self-regulation, we find growing contestations, with some calling for novel forms of regulatory oversight. Our findings reveal new tensions, fractures, and realignments between and among government, industry, and NGOs actors over gene-editing governance. These tensions and realignments reflect and respond to demands for broader engagement of publics and greater transparency in the governance of biotechnologies in agriculture and food. We argue that these emerging tensions and realignments between and among state and nonstate actors reflect efforts by these actors to incorporate lessons from the genetically modified organism labeling fight as they seek to (re)shape the governance of gene editing in a manner that reflects their interests.

Alliance Building among Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in China: The Emergence and Evolution of the Zero Waste Alliance

Despite the Chinese state’s long-standing wariness of strong horizontal linkages among nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and a deteriorating political climate for civil society activism, cross-regional alliances among NGOs have become a persistent phenomenon in recent years. This article draws on the case of the Zero Waste Alliance—a nationwide coalition of environmental NGOs engaged in waste-related matters—to identify structural conditions that encouraged its emergence and illuminate how alliance builders have interpreted their environment. The article argues that developments internal to the environmental NGO sector (an increased need to pool scarce resources and professional knowledge, a stronger inclination to collaborate among a new generation of NGO leaders, and the formation of epistemic communities), combined with conditional state lenience, have propelled activists to embark on a strategy of alliance building. This case illustrates how the perceived boundary of the permissible shifts when structural conditions incentivize entrepreneurial activists to explore new strategies, and these attempts do not provoke repressive responses. It also highlights that the state has remained conditionally tolerant of boundary-pushing NGO behavior in a sector aligning with its interests, while strengthening political control over civil society.

Journalism as an Advocacy Tool: Negotiating Boundaries of Professionalism in the 20th-Century American Environmental Movement

Environmental nongovernmental organizations faced unprecedented opportunities after public interest in environmental issues exploded in the 1960s. Drawing on the official archives of the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and the National Audubon Society, this study demonstrates how these organizations redeveloped their publications to take advantage of newfound public interest and political opportunities in the 1960s through the 1980s. The organizations adopted professional journalistic norms and practices in their publications to court mass appeal and gain political legitimacy, but their journalistic endeavors were hampered by internal disagreements over the use of journalism as an advocacy tool.

BROKER AND BUFFER: WHY ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS PARTICIPATE IN POPULAR PROTESTS IN CHINA*

The social movement literature considers that institutional allies facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes, but it has not sufficiently analyzed how such alliances emerge and endure. This gap becomes more significant in nondemocratic settings, where institutional support of protests is monitored, restricted, and suppressed. Drawing upon fifty in-depth interviews, this article examines the variations of environmental nongovernmental organizations' (NGO) participation in four popular protests in China. I find that environmental NGOs collaborated with grassroots protesters to varying degrees, ranging from minimal presence of information provision, policy advocacy, coalition building, to pervasive participation including protest mobilization. The degree of NGO participation cannot be explained by organizational resources, civic communities, or political environments; rather, it hinges on skillful agencies that broker otherwise disconnected resources and buffer political pressure for their partners. My research contributes to the relational approach to social movements and to studies on the interactions among social movements, NGOs, and the authoritarian state.