Environmental movements

This chapter analyses how environmental movements’ struggles for environmental sustainability have overlapped with social concerns and considers their implications as well as contradictions for democracy and transformation concerns. More particularly, it scrutinises debates over movements’ varieties of environmentalism, over their institutionalisation processes and new grassroots environmental activism, from the environmental justice and LULUs movements, to those focused on urban interstitial alternatives, and the new 2019 environmental upsurge. Problematising a general bias towards a post-material understanding of environmental movements, it follows the conceptualisation of a strand of studies that have placed a democratic quest at the core of their understanding of environmental movements. It delves on a specific subset of environmental movements, what is referred to as ‘socio-environmental movements’, i.e. those movements whose expression of ecological concerns went hand-in-hand with broader socio-political claims, reflecting on their transformative potential as well as contradictions and ambiguities linked to forms of actions, types of strategies and organisational modes.