PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS
Dryzek et al. ( 2003 )argue that an insider strategy will only be effective where
amovement ‘can attach its interest to one or more of the imperatives that
constitute the state’s core’ (p. 192). However, the long-standing and familiar
problem for the environmental movement is that its interests clash with
the core state imperative of economic growth. Exceptionally, the American
environmental movement was able to exercise considerable policy influence
over the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, when the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency was formed and a tranche of environmental legisla-
tion enacted, because the core economic growth imperative was temporarily
replaced by a legitimation imperative. Confronted by a range of controver-
sial social and political issues (the Vietnam war, civil rights, student unrest
etc.) and the emergence of a thriving counter-culture, Nixon saw the envi-
ronment as one issue on which he could appease public discontent and
diffuse the momentum behind the movement (ibid.: 34). Subsequently, the
environmental movement in the USA and elsewhere had limited impact,
with insider strategies turning out to represent a ‘bad bargain, because the
included group must either remain tame (avoiding core imperatives), frus-
trated (as it runs up against the core), or be deflected (to more minor issues
at the periphery)’ (ibid.: 163).
The rise of ecological modernisation, which regards economic and envi-
ronmental concerns as potentially complementary, brought a change in the
fortunes of the environmental movement in a handful of Northern Euro-
pean countries (see Chapter8). Norwegian environmental groups, for exam-
ple, were incorporated into government policymaking from the mid-1980s,
resulting in undoubted policy advances (although it is hard to evaluate their
impact on any particular policy). By contrast, in Germany, where ecological
modernisation also arrived early, but the state was initially less willing to
embrace environmental groups, the environmental movement pursued a
dual insider–outsider strategy of seeking inclusion in the governmental pol-
icy process whilst retaining an active, often confrontational, involvement in
civil society. The optimistic lesson is that the core imperatives of the state
are not set in stone and that the alternative policy paradigm of ecological
modernisation offers a firmer basis for an insider strategy. Consequently,
the message for the environmental movement in its many and varied forms
is to do all it can to shape the core imperatives of the state to make them
congruent with the environmental imperative (Dryzek et al. 2003 ).◗ Conclusion
Two maintrends have characterised the contemporary environmental move-
ment. The extensive convergence of major environmental organisations in
most countries towards an institutionalised, professional public interest
model has seen even once radical groups, such as FoE and Greenpeace, drawn
increasingly into the establishment fold. Yet, in the UK and USA in particular,