The Origins of Environmental Association

We examine the origins of voluntary associations devoted to environmental protection. We argue that national resources and political institutions generate opportunities and constraints that shape domestic environmental association. Moreover, we develop and extend neoinstitutional ‘world polity’ arguments to account for domestic associations around the globe. We use event history and dynamic panel models to analyze the formation of domestic environmental associations for a large sample of countries in the contemporary period. Among highly industrialized countries, domestic factors largely explain the prevalence of environmental associations: resources and political institutions that afford favorable opportunities. Across the developing world, global forces prove to be a powerful catalyst for environmental organizing. The movement which had domestic origins in the West becomes institutionalized in the world polity, generating new environmental associations on a global scale. We also find positive effects of democratic institutions and philanthropic foundations. Environmental degradation and societal affluence are not primary drivers of environmental association. Introduction Voluntary associations have garnered a great deal of attention as a source of social capital and public goods, and as an infrastructure for social movements (e.g., McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Putnam 2000; Paxton 2002; Reimann 2006). Where do associations come from? We explore the origins of environmental associations throughout the world, focusing on the sharply different trajectories observed in highly industrialized versus less-industrialized countries. Environmental associations have proliferated worldwide in recent decades, ranging from household names like the Sierra Club in the United States to a host of less-familiar groups, such as the Swedish NGO Secretariat on Acid Rain (founded in 1982), the Algerian Ecological Movement (1993), and the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (1992). This diverse population represents an organizational base for the environmental movement and is seen as a potent source of political change (Brulle 2000). Popular accounts treat the environmental movement – and pro-environmental association more specifically – as a grassroots response to the tragedy of environmental degradation (e.g., Shabecoff 2003). Scholarly accounts by historians and environmental sociologists frequently retain some of this flavor, but emphasize the requisite capacities for mobilization and political participation, such as wealth, organizing skills, and pro-environmental values. We draw upon ideas from social movements, sociology of the state, and neo-institutional theory to situate the formation of environmental associations within a broader political and cultural context. In addition to testing arguments about the importance of national institutions and opportunity structures, we posit that global institutions and culture drive the expansion of domestic association, particularly in the developing world (see Figure 1). Prior neo-institutional or “world polity” scholarship has examined the diffusion of pro-environmental state policies (e.g., Frank et al. 2000). We go beyond this work, arguing that the world polity not only affects the state but penetrates down into civil society as well, with transformative consequences.