This week on my third-year undergraduate Green Politics module, we are engaging with the subject of environmental activism. Like many of the topics that we explore on the module, environmental activism can be an issue that students feel strongly about. Students might, for example, be inspired to take the Green Politics module because they themselves have already been keenly involved in environmental protest or other forms of activism. This can, in turn, mean that students come to the classroom with strong feelings about the subject and ingrained ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when it comes to the practice of environmental activism.
This poses a challenge for instructors – how do we get students to critically engage with a subject that they care deeply about and get them to avoid “knee-jerk” opinions and risk classroom polarisation? This is not a question that is exclusive to environmental politics and activism; however, it is one wherein I think we can demonstrate potential answers.
How we might approach the seminar-based critical analysis of environmental activism, whilst still ensuring students get to enjoy engaging with the subject, is something that I wrote about earlier this year in PS: Political Science & Politics, in an article entitled ‘Developing a Critical Understanding of Environmental Activism through Active Learning’.
In the article, I reflect on my experience of running an active learning exercise that has provided a context for students to enthusiastically discuss and debate forms of and approaches to environmental activism, whilst still centring critical analysis. The approach begins with introducing a typology of nonpartisan political organisations, taken from Diani and Donati’s (1999) paper ‘Organizational Change in Western European Environmental Groups: A Framework for Analysis’. This typology is introduced in the Green Politics lecture and the paper is assigned reading for the week – meaning that students should have a pretty strong understanding of it when they arrive in the seminars.
The typology focuses on two key factors that shape the outlook of a nonpartisan political organisation: resourcing and forms of action. Mixing and matching these two factors creates four types of nonpartisan organisations:
Table 1: A typology of nonpartisan political organisations
In brief, the four types of organisation all have distinct characteristics:
- Public interest lobby – professional staff, low participation, traditional pressure tactics.
- Participatory protest organisation – participatory action, subcultural structures, disruptive protest.
- Professional protest organisation – professional activism & mobilisation of financial resources with use of both confrontational and conventional tactics.
- Participatory pressure group – involves rank-and-file members/supporters, conventional pressure tactics.
As a side note, when this typology is introduced in the interactive lecture, students are then given some time in groups to try and find real-world examples of environmental activist organisations that they think fits the description of each type.
With the typology introduced, in the seminars we run a small simulation. I split the class into three groups but all the students are told that they are now playing the role of committed environmentalists (maybe not the biggest acting challenge for those who have chosen to take a module called Green Politics!). Each of the three groups is then given a ‘situation’, wherein there is an environmental crisis occurring and the group has an end goal that they are determined to reach. The situations run from the slightly to the (at least for now…) very fictional. As I currently run it the exercise, the situations are as follows:
• With other countries banning the import of the United Kingdom’s plastic waste, a stockpile has rapidly built up in the country. There are no immediate solutions seemingly available that will result in recycling of the waste. Without any public awareness of this fact, the government has taken radical steps to confront the problem of plastic waste piling up across ports. Ships loaded with the plastic are sailing into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where they dump the waste into the sea before returning to the United Kingdom to repeat the process. You are determined to make this practice stop as soon as you can.
• Although the UK government has a legally binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, progress toward that target has begun to slow down. The government no longer appears to be taking the target date seriously and certainly will fail to meet short-term targets in the coming years. Rather than taking these failures seriously, the government maintains that its primary responsibility is to protect the United Kingdom’s struggling economy. You are determined to make the government realise the importance of concerted climate action and to get them back on track toward meeting the 2050 target.
• A multinational fossil-fuel extraction company recently acquired the rights to begin several fracking operations across the United Kingdom. Your town now has a fracking site in development only two miles away, causing great concern about the safety and health of the town’s residents and for the local environment. Every day, the once-quiet streets of your town have trucks driving through them to deliver industrial hardware and chemicals to the fracking site, which already is impacting your quality of life and is a constant reminder of the changes that fracking might bring. You are determined to halt the local fracking business in an effort to protect your town and the local environment.
Students are then given 20 minutes in their groups to discuss how they, as a group of committed environmental activists, are going to reach the outcome they are determined to reach. They are encouraged to be imaginative but also to base their answer around Diani and Donati’s typology, i.e. they have to think seriously about what resources they might be able to employ and whether using disruptive tactics, rather than conventional pressure, might harm or help their cause. Students then present their environmental activist campaign (and type of organisation) they have constructed to the rest of the class, explaining why they think it is the best path to achieving their goals.
Following the presentations, we spend some time discussing our conclusions from the exercise in a debrief – how does context impact environmental activists’ decisions? What does ‘success’ or ‘failure’ look like for environmental activists groups’? Might in-class challenges in creating a clear campaign be representative of real-life challenges?
I have run this exercise for a few years and have found it to be a really great way to get students to engage with a topic that, for many, might call on quite personal experiences of political engagement, whilst still centering critical analysis with reference to a relevant literature. If you’re interested in learning more about the exercise, do check out the article in PS (it’s open access!) or feel free to drop a comment with any questions below.