Global Environmental Politics Problems, Policy and Practice

Introduction

Most of the chapters in this book focus on how states, multilateral institutions, and corporate actors have responded to global environmental problems. We have seen that civil society groups often play an important role in shaping the decisions and actions of these state and corporate actors. But in this chapter, civil society – and social movements in particular – moves to centre stage. Social movements are defined as ‘collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarity, and sustained interaction with a common opponent and authorities’ (Tarrow 2011: 9). Social movements are often not central to studies of global governance or domestic politics, but to ignore them risks overlooking the central role they have played in bringing about progressive change since the late eighteenth century (Fominaya 2014: 4). In Chapters 6 and 7 we saw how contemporary global environmental governance is characterised by a commitment to the liberal economic system; this predicates environmental protection on existing systems of international trade, capitalist accumulation, and economic growth. Social movements from the North and South have fiercely resisted this approach. Through repertoires of protest and experimental practices, social movements have challenged the principles and assumptions that underpin unsustainable practices and ‘liberal environmentalist’ policies. In this chapter we explore how this resistance has manifested in the context of unsustainable agriculture.

The chapter begins with an overview of resistance, touching on questions of definition and strategy before briefly reviewing how movements have resisted neoliberal economic globalisation and neoliberal environmental projects. We then pick up the case study of unsustainable agriculture by first charting the rise of the modern industrialised agricultural system, and then unpacking the relationship between environmental change and modern agriculture. Here we examine the various ways in which industrialised agriculture is both implicated in and vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation. Concerns about the environmental and social impacts of the modern agricultural system have motivated social movements to demand far-reaching reforms to agricultural and trade policies, and to develop alternative practices of sustainable agriculture based on agroecology and the localisation of food production and trade. We examine this demand-based resistance and action-based resistance and explore a set of prominent case studies to more deeply understand what resistance to unsustainable agriculture looks like in practice.