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Christopher Rootes (Ed.). Environmental Protest in Western Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1177/1086026604268013
This edited volume, part of the Oxford series on contemporary issues in comparative politics and policy, was published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. The focus of the book covers both the ways in which environmental movement organizations have developed relationships within government-oriented policy networks and the resurgence in the 1990s of environmental protest and radicalism in many European nations. Separate chapters are devoted to Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Basque country (a curious choice rather than the Netherlands or Austria), and Spain. Overall, this is a very polished and professional work in the empirical social science tradition.
One of the book's strengths is that each chapter has a parallel approach, method, conceptual structure, and patterned presentation of results. The evolving continent-wide patterns and the comparisons between nations are thus easy to grasp. This is particularly true with regard to a central interest of the book-the frequency and character of environmental protest events during the period from 1988 to 1997. Each chapter meticulously documents protest events through a careful monitoring of the accounts of such events as reported in leading newspapers (The Guardian in Britain and Le Monde in France, for example). Each chapter also provides readers with an excellent synopsis of environmental movement history within each nation and provides a detailed guide to environmental movement organizations.
Environmental protest events are related to the wider issues of the day within each nation and to the changing character of incumbent governments. Protests are carefully sorted as well in terms of the particular issues that they address. This latter data set provides some of the more interesting comparative results. Animal welfare, hunting, nature conservation, and transportation (especially protests regarding...