PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS
The environmental movement has undoubtedly exerted a significant, and
continuing,sensitisingimpact by helping place the environment on the polit-
ical agenda and stimulating public support for environmental protection.
Perhapsits main achievement has been to create a climate in which govern-
ments are expected to pay greater attention to environmental protection,
even if it is not yet on a par with traditional material issues. Both insider
and outsider strategies have played their part in this process of ecological
sensibility. The established environmental lobby provides a constant educa-
tive and persuasive pressure on policy elites to consider the environment.
Further from the heart of government, confrontational actions that cap-
ture media attention have repeatedly succeeded in pushing environmental
issues into the public gaze. Together, the different parts of the environmen-
tal movement have all helped to shape the political discourse, from climate
change to biodiversity, and from energy to waste.
One consequence has been a tranche ofstructuralchanges in the way gov-
ernments treat environmental problems. In particular, environmental pres-
sure was largely responsible for the creation of environment ministries in
most governments (see Chapter11).
The insider strategy has achieved some notableproceduralsuccesses. Every-
where the environmental lobby is listened to more closely and across much
of Northern Europe, North America and Australasia it is now regularly con-
sulted on many subjects. The international environmental lobby is repre-
sented in several UN and other international, including EU, consultation
networks. A key question is whether procedural gains translate into influ-
ence. As Chapter7 shows, environmental groups have achieved only lim-
ited access to the policy networks that shape core economic decisions – in
finance, industry, trade, energy and agriculture – which are still dominated
bycorporate and producer interests. Where regular access is secured, as
is widespread in corporatist Norway where the environmental movement
is represented on a multitude of governmental policymaking committees
(Dryzek et al. 2003 : 22–5), there is a price to being an insider group, which
involves compromise, obedience to the rules of the game and doing business
with interests whose values and actions may be anathema to most environ-
mentalists. In the USA, the incorporationary pressures of the Washington
lobby, for example, were apparent in the negotiation of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s. Having opposed it when
proposed by George Bush, most environmental groups eventually supported
NAFTA in order to maintain their access to the Clinton White House and
because they had been ‘purchased’ by large corporate donations, upon which
they depend so heavily (Bosso 2005 :76, 115). Insider status can also prove
fragile. In both the UK and the USA the environmental lobby found that the
improved access to government that it achieved in the 1970s was dramat-
ically reduced under the anti-environmentalist leadership of Thatcher and
Reagan respectively (McCormick 1991 ;Dowie 1995 )–andintheUSA,after