PART 2
Par ties and movements:
getting from here to there
Part II examines the question of green agency; or how do we get from here to
there? How do we achieve a sustainable society? One distinction to be made is
that between collective action and individual lifestyle politics. The focus in Part II
is on the main forms of collective action in environmental politics, namely green
parties, the ‘greening’ of established parties and environmental groups, while
the discussion of selected individual strategies, such as green consumerism, is
left to Part. 1
A second distinction arises from the familiarreformistversusradicaldilemma
that underpins environmental politics. A broad strategic choice facing any
political movement is whether to seek change through legislative institutions
and the use of conventional forms of political activity or whether to adopt a
more confrontational strategy that breaks the law and challenges the dominant
rules and values of the political system. This tension lies at the heart of practical
environmental politics: it underpins debates within green parties, colours their
relationships with established parties and cuts across the wider environmental
movement.
It is also important to place the rise of environmental politics within broader
debates in political science about the trend towards a ‘new politics’ in advanced
industrialised societies. To understand the ‘new politics’, we need first to
understand what is meant by the ‘old politics’ that the ‘new politics’ is
supposedly replacing. In the old politics, support for established parties is
characterised by stable political cleavages and differences based on class,
religion or regional divisions, of which the left–right pattern of partisan alignment
is pre-eminent (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). The traditional values underlying
political discourse relate to material issues of economics and security, such as
economic growth, stable prices, public order, national security and the