In the previous two chapters we showed that there was considerable variation in mobilization across our twenty communities. In this chapter we turn our attention to the all-important issue of “movement outcomes.” At the heart of the chapter is a single, stark, research question: does the aforementioned variation in mobilization help us understand the ultimate fate of the proposed projects? To answer the question, we look at three different “outcome” measures. The first is whether the project was rejected during the regulatory review process. The second is the opposite of the first, whether the project was approved during the regulatory review process. The third – a very different outcome – is whether the project was ultimately built.

Given the exceedingly modest levels of contention that we found across our cases, we were frankly expecting to see little affect of mobilization/nonmobilization on project outcomes. Taken together, however, our results show a surprisingly strong imprint of mobilization/nonmobilization on the ultimate fate of the projects. Three specific findings bear mention. The strongest relationship is a negative one: the failure of a community to mobilize is, in and of itself, sufficient to explain project approval. Although the converse is not true, mobilization is an important component of the recipes explaining project rejection. The outcome that shows the weakest relationship to mobilization/nonmobilization is whether the project is ultimately built. This makes sense. The decision to build a project depends on a host of factors – most importantly in our cases, the variable health of the relevant energy market at the time of construction – other than level of opposition. Still we will include all three measures in our analysis. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we dig into the data, we want to review the curious history of research – or lack thereof – into this seemingly most important of research questions.

From its modest beginnings during the 1970s and early 1980s, the study of social movements has developed into one of the largest subfields in American sociology. In recent years, scholars in a host of other disciplines or fields – including political science (Beissinger 2001; Bunce 1999; Dalton, Van Sickle, and Weldon 2009; della Porta 1995; Dosh 2009; Kitschelt 1995; Koopmans 1993; Kriesi et al. 1995; O’Brien and Li 2006; Tarrow 2005; Wood 2003; Yashar 2005), organizational studies (Davis and McAdam 2000; Davis et al. 2005; Ingram, Yue, and Rao 2010; Lounsbury 2005; Rao, Monin, and Durand 2003; Strang and Soule 1998; Vogus and Davis 2005), education (Binder 2002; Davies and Quirke 2005; Hallett 2010; Rojas 2006, 2007; Slaughter 1997; Stevens 2001), environmental studies (Aldrich 2008; Rootes 2003; Rucht 1999; Sherman 2011; Vasi 2011), and law and society (Edelman, Leachman, and McAdam 2010; Gustafsson and Vinthagen 2011; Kay 2005; McCann 1994; Pedriana 2006) – have turned increasingly to social movement theory in an effort to better understand the dynamics of conflict and change within their respective scholarly domains. But even as we acknowledge and celebrate the vibrancy of the field, we worry about what we see as its increasing narrowness. In his 2009 article in Annual Review of Sociology, Andrew Walder voices similar concerns, criticizing what he sees as the field’s preoccupation with the dynamics of “mobilization” and general disinterest in a host of broader topics, including the traditional focus among political sociologists on the macrolinks between social structure and various forms of political behavior. There are, however, two other sources of “narrowness” in the field that concern us even more than the one identified by Walder.

Having worked our way through the main empirical findings from the research, we want to use this final chapter to do three things. We begin by revisiting the four key research questions with which we opened the book, answering each in turn based on what we have learned from our investigation. But the book was never conceived as simply a conventional research monograph. Instead, the study was motivated by a broader theoretical agenda that was reflected, as well, in our research design. Concerned that the characteristic narrowness and movement-centric focus of most scholarship in the field has seriously distorted our understanding of contentious politics, we undertook a research project that we hoped would put movements “in their place.” That is, instead of selecting successful movements for study, we chose to research communities – communities “at risk” for mobilization by virtue of their shared exposure to the “threat” of environmentally risky energy projects. Our goal was to downplay the emphasis on movements and focus on the ways that local context shapes the prospects for emergent contention, whatever form that takes. We also wanted to focus less on opposition groups and more on the broader array of actors who shape episodes of contention and stability and change in public policy. Consistent with this aim, our second goal for the chapter is to discuss our results in light of the substantial body of work on the policy process. This is all by way of urging movement scholars to take account of other literatures that clearly bear on their subject matter. Because we were simultaneously studying the dynamics of local conflict and, in the case of LNG, what we see as the emergence and consolidation of a new policy subsystem in the area of energy, it is important for us to tease out the implications of our work for this important literature. All of this is in the service of our general aim of contributing to a more Copernican understanding of contention at the expense of the Ptolemaic perspective that has come, in our view, to characterize the field. Our final goal for the chapter, then, is to use what we see as the important implications of our research to call for a significant reorientation and broadening of the field of social movement studies.

Social movement scholars have long faced a methodological dilemma familiar to social scientists. We refer to the stark choice between two research methods that are, in their respective strengths and weaknesses, mirror images of one another. The choice is between “thin” large N studies that allow researchers to generalize to broader populations versus “thick” case studies that yield a rich, holistic understanding of the phenomenon in question, but without being able to tell us anything about the representativeness of the specific case on offer. These two options do not exhaust the methodological strategies available to movement researchers, but a broad scan of the extant empirical work on social movements would, we are convinced, show that these two approaches have been broadly modal in the field throughout the past thirty years.

The single case study has been especially popular with social movement scholars. A partial list of classic studies of single movements would include Adam (1987) on the gay and lesbian movement; Jenkins (1985) and Ganz (2009) on the farmworkers movement; Morris (1984), McAdam (1999 [1982], Luders (2010), and Andrews (2004) on the U.S. civil rights movement; Costain (1992), Rupp and Taylor (1987), Banaszak (1996), Evans (1979), and Mansbridge (1986) on various “chapters” or movements in the history of U.S. feminism; Amenta (2006) on the Townsend movement; Parsa (1989) and Arjomand (1988) on the Iranian Revolution; Meyer (1990) on the nuclear freeze movement; Smith (1991) on liberation theology; Schwartz (1976) on the Southern Farmers’ Alliance; McVeigh (2009) on the resurgent Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s; Gould (2009) on ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power); and Walder (2009b) on the Beijing Red Guard movement. The fact that we could easily double or triple this list of citations only serves to make our point: it is probably fair to say that the case study has been the central arrow in the methodological quiver of social movement scholars.

In Chapter 1, we spelled out four principal research questions that we hoped to address in the book: How much emergent collective action do we see across the twenty communities we are studying? What causal conditions explain variation in the level of mobilization in these communities? Net of other factors, what influence, if any, does the level of mobilized opposition have on the outcome of the proposed project? Finally, why did opposition to one kind of energy project – liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals – grow into broader regional movements in some parts of the country but not others? In this chapter, we take up the first two of these questions. We aim to establish something of a baseline of just how much emergent collective action we see across the twenty communities we are studying and then move to see if we can identify certain mixes of factors – or “recipes” in the language of fuzzy set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) – that help account for variation in level of mobilization across these locales. We begin with a basic description of the level and forms of emergent collective action we found in the twenty communities that we have come to know so well throughout the past few years.

ESTABLISHING A BASELINE

A newcomer to the United States would be forgiven if, in reading the social movement literature, she or he imagined that our communities were awash in protest activity. In a 2005 article, McAdam and colleagues (2005: 2) argued that the field’s initial engagement with and continued interest in the movements of the 1960s had “created a stylized image of movements that threatens to distort our understanding of popular contention . . . in the contemporary U.S. . . . This stylized view tends to equate movements with:

• Disruptive protest in public settings

• Loosely coordinated national struggles over political issues

• Urban and/or campus-based protest activities

• Claim making by disadvantaged minorities.”

In the previous two chapters we took up issues – movement emergence and outcomes – to which scholars have devoted a great deal of attention. By contrast, in this chapter, we focus on a topic about which we know comparatively little. We refer to “scale shift,” or the geographic expansion or contraction of contention. In a 2005 article, McAdam and colleagues lament what they see as the “distorting lens” of social movement scholarship. More specifically, they fault movement scholars for continuing to propound a stylized view of social movements rooted in the field’s early preoccupation with the New Left/New Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This “stylized view,” they contend, equates movements with the following four features:

• Disruptive protest in public settings,

• Urban and/or campus-based movement activities,

• Contentious claim making by disadvantaged minorities, and

• Loosely coordinated national struggles over political issues.

They go on to present data from their time-series analysis of “protest events” in Chicago between 1970 and 2000 in an effort to show that all of these features are wildly atypical of movement activity, especially during the most recent period.

In this chapter we focus on the last of these stylized elements. McAdam and colleagues (2005) frame their discussion of the element in the following way: “National movements tend to be the modal object of study for movement analysts. So, for example, for the U.S. we have extensive literatures on such national struggles as: African-American civil rights, women’s, environmental, pro-choice, pro-life, among others. Does the empirical attention accorded [these] national movements match their actual proportion in the population of all contentious events?” (10). Based on their data, the answer is unambiguous. “A scant six percent of all . . . events were coded as ‘national’ in their focus . . .. In contrast . . . nearly three-quarters of the total were judged to be focused on ‘city’ . . . or neighborhood issues” (10–11).

Generally scores were assigned to quantitative variables corresponding to their percentile value among the twenty communities. Typically, in fuzzy set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis one must designate a point of maximum ambiguity. In this method, the median or 50th percentile is designated as the point of maximum ambiguity. Cases fell in a set for a specific variable if the value of the variable was greater than 0.5. Under this condition the community received a score of 0.6. If the variable value was higher than the 80th percentile, it received a score of 0.8. If the variable value was above the 99th percentile, it received a score of 1. Cases fell out of the set with values of 0.4 if the value was above the 40th percentile and below the 50th percentile, 0.2 if the value was above the 20th percentile and below the 40th percentile, and 0 if the value was below the 20th percentile. Scores were cross-checked against natural break points in the data and typically matched these quite nicely. Some variables (noted in the following text) were assigned scores limited to set membership (1) or nonmembership (0), which reflected if a certain condition was present.

After individual variables were assigned fuzzy scores, they were often combined to form the conceptual causal condition. For example, civic and organizational capacity was constructed using the fuzzy scores for values associated with a community’s general education level, voter turnout rates, and number of nonprofits per capita. Most commonly, we combined these by adding the fuzzy scores assigned to individual variables and then reassigning fuzzy scores to the sum according to the procedure detailed in the preceding text in which scores corresponded to percentile rank.

Why social movements?

At first blush it might seem odd to accord a prominent conceptual spot to the study of social movements in a volume on “global projects.” And indeed, if this volume had been put together thirty to forty years ago, it would not have been necessary. But the world was a very different place in, say, the mid-1970s. In much of the developing world at that time the main challenges to large infrastructure projects remained primarily technical and/or engineering in nature. Not so anymore. Today virtually all the big technical challenges to such projects have been solved. The primary threats to global infrastructure projects now take the form of misunderstandings and conflicts resulting from conflicting institutional frameworks or from the reactive mobilization by grassroots groups and/or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) opposed to construction. This chapter details the challenges posed by the latter source: collective movements resistant to development.

The emergence of reactive mobilizing groups mirrors an earlier shift toward resistance to infrastructure projects that occurred in the democratic West. Such projects were almost invariably completed in the first five to six decades of the twentieth century, but resistance to such projects increased substantially in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, as the rise of the New Left in the US and the “new social movements” in Western Europe, dramatically increased the general levels of social movement activity in those countries.