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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, and World 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.
Keywords: environmental movements: globalization; political opportunity structure; World Bank; WTO
Environmental movements and environmental movement organizations (EMOs) have become a vital part of contemporary politics in many parts of the world.1 They have not only influenced substantive politics, for example, in the field of nuclear energy (Flam, 1994; Kitschelt, 1986), but they have also contributed to a change in public values and attitudes and to a revitalization of civil society (Wapner, 2002).
One of the distinctive contributions from political science to the study of environmental and other social movements has been the concept of political opportunity structure (POS: Flam, 1994; Kitschelt, 1986; van der Heijden, 1997). To a large extent, POS could explain the different successes, strategies, action repertoires, levels of mobilization, and organizational structures of environmental movements in individual countries. As for the antinuclear struggle, it could, for instance, explain why France persisted in its nuclear energy policy whereas Germany did not, or why the action repertoire in these two countries was much more radical than in countries like Sweden and the United States (Flam, 1994; Kitschelt, 1986). It could also explain why the total constituency of national Dutch EMOs is larger than that of German EMOs, although Germany has five times as many inhabitants (van der Heijden, 1997).
However, with the increasing globalization of environmental problems and solution strategies during...