Socio-environmental movements as democratizing agents

Since their birth, environmental movements have represented a key challenge to established democratic norms and institutions, striving for a greater democratisation of society-nature relationships and more broadly for a redressing of issues of structural injustice that are thought to be linked to environmental unsustainability. This is especially so for what I will refer to as socio-environmental movements, i.e. those movements whose expression of ecological concerns went hand-in-hand with broader socio-political claims. This chapter shows how different varieties of environmentalism are intertwined with distinct visions and practices of democracy by environmental movements. One the one hand, this chapter argues that a thick and thin accounts of (ecological vs. environmental) democracy have led to diverse movement strategies. On the other hand, the democratic dimension of movement practices (and contradictions thereof) is scrutinised through the angles of both movement organising (institutionalized vs. grassroots) as well as everyday politics and the prefiguration of movements’ alternatives. By so doing, this chapter sheds light on the transformative potential as well as ambiguities of interstitial urban environmental activism centred on the collective organisation and enactment of alternative modes of being and relating to the human and non-human world.