Challenging Global Environmental Governance: Social Movement Agency and Global Civil Society

摘要

Within orthodox International Relations (IR), global governance is widely regarded as the solution to problems perceived to be global, such as environmental degradation. Among these efforts to "organize life on the planet" social movements have been all but invisible, traditionally perceived as mere "mosquitoes" on the evening breeze, relegated to their national contexts, hardly seen and certainly never heard at the high table of international economic and political relations. Only recently has the more established end of the spectrum of social movements―that of large-scale NGOs―been accorded a space for engagement with global environmental governance through the sphere of global civil society, which has been widely portrayed as a democratizing force. However the orthodox, liberal conceptualization eschews an analysis of power relations, both inside the sphere and between global civil society, the inter-state system and the global market. It tends to conflate social movements with NGOs. Much has been written about social movements in global politics, which need not be reviewed here. In this article social movements are broadly conceived as lying on a spectrum ranging from grassroots movements to transnational NGOs engaged in working for what they perceive to be progressive social and ecological change.