Globalization, Environmental Movements, and International Political Opportunity Structures

Abstract

Political opportunity structure refers to the specific features of a political system (e.g., a country) that can explain the different action repertoires, organizational forms and impacts of social movements, and social movement organizations in that specific country. With the globalization of environmental problems and solution strategies, important parts of the environmental movement have also become global. To what extent could the concept of international political opportunity structure (IPOS) be useful for analyzing transnational environmentalism in the 21st century? In this article, four of the most important constituent parts of IPOS (United Nations [UN], European Union [EU], World Bank, andWorld Trade Organization [WTO]) and their interactions with environmental movements and environmental movement organizations are analyzed. Whereas the UN and EU provoke the participation of a large number of transnational environmental lobby groups whose impacts, however, remain limited, the World Bank and WTO provoke more unconventional actions with potentially farther reaching impacts.