PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS
and to win regular access to policy elites. There is little doubt that environ-
mental groups have been the most effective movement fighting for progres-
sive environmental change, particularly in those countries such as the USA
and UK where there is no successful green party and established parties
have been largely unresponsive to environmental problems. Nevertheless,
this process of institutionalisation involved compromises that blunted the
radical edge of large groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and
contributed to the resurgence of grassroots environmental groups during
the1990s, including the UK anti-roads protesters and the US environmen-
tal justice movement. Thus the environmental movement has confronted a
dilemma familiar to many other political movements: should it maintain
thereformist insider strategy of pressure politics, or should it pursue a
radical outsider strategy of confrontational protest politics?
In this chapter, the development and achievements of the environmental
movement are examined. The opening sections provide an audit of envi-
ronmental groups and outline a typology that will be used to help make
sense of this large and diverse movement. The following sections explore
the dynamictension between themainstreamenvironmental lobby and the
less formally organisedgrassrootssector as a means of examining some cen-
tral questions of green agency.^1 The main focus is on the strategic dilemmas
facing any environmental group: should it adopt a professional or participa-
toryorganisational structure, and should it use conventional or disruptive
forms ofpressure? Thenext sectionexamines the spread of transnational
environmental action as one response to the challenge of globalisation and
considers whether it represents the emergence of a new civil society. The
final sectionoffers a tentative evaluation of the impact of environmental
groups. One theme running through the chapter is the extent to which the
environmental movement represents a manifestation of the new politics.◗ The environmental movement: an audit
The environmental movement, if judged simply by its sheer size and the
scale of its activity, has clearly become a significant force in most indus-
trialised countries. The USA boasts at least 150 national environmental
organisations and 12,000 grassroots groups with a total estimated member-
ship of 14 million (Sale 1993 ). There are around 200 national organisations
and between 4 and 5 million members in the UK (Rawcliffe 1998 ;Rootes
and Miller 2000 )and about 900 organisations and 3.5 million members in
Germany (Bluhdorn ̈ 1995 ). The Dutch have the highest membership per
capita: one survey found that a remarkable 45 per cent of Dutch adults
claimed to be members of an environmental organisation, compared with
15 per cent of Americans, 13 per cent of Danish and under 3 per cent of
German, British and French adults (Dalton 2005 : 444).^2
Two distinct waves of pressure-group mobilisation can be identified in
most industrialised nations (Lowe and Goyder 1983 ; Dalton 1994 ;Brand