Environmental Movement in a ‘Transition’ Society: the Case of Russia

Abstract

The paper represents an attempt to construct a partial concept of the emergence and maintenance of an environmental movement under critical conditions — the collapse of state socialism and transition to wild capitalism accompanied by a systemic crisis of society and its basic values. The underpinning of the proposed concept is the idea that an environmental movement as a collective social actor is reproduced in interactions with a context of different kind and scale. The more the movement’s contexts become turbulent and hostile, the stronger its shift from the production of collective actions towards the reproduction of its own organizations and networks. The paper examines the major elements of this reproduction process: key values, the type of social reflection, the nature of the resources and the mode of their mobilization, the space of economic, social and political opportunities, the degree of the integration of the movement’s organizations into global organizations and networks.

This article is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant N7SUPJ 048255).