From environmental (movement) organizations to the organizing of environmental collective action

This chapter makes two logically connected points. First, it highlights the risk of jumping to conclusions about the existence of “environmental movements” from the existence of actors interested in environmental issues or of public events addressing those issues. Collective action on environmental issues may actually take place through a number of “modes of coordination”, not all reducible to a social movement dynamic. Some of those modes do not even require a central role for organizations; hence, the shift from “organization”, conceived as bounded, goal-oriented units with some internal rules, to “organizing”, i.e., the mechanisms through which agents coordinate their action even in the absence of formal rules and boundaries. As we shall see, recent literature on environmental collective action provides several illustrations of this multiplicity of modes of coordination. Second, the chapter tries to go beyond the simple recognition of environmental actors’ “diversity” by discussing, more precisely, how diversity and heterogeneity may shape interactions in specific settings.