Environmental Review & Case Studies: “We Don't Need to Sell Our Souls”: Scale Focusing and the Politics of the Local in Environmental Justice Activism

Abstract

This article analyzes how Stop the Power (STP), an environmental justice social movement organization based in Brockton, Massachusetts, has confronted a well-resourced corporate opponent and a challenging state regulatory process. Drawing on semistructured interviews with key activists, organization-generated documents such as flyers, petitions, videos, and webpages, and articles from local newspapers, we argue that, rather than jump scale, STP has instead engaged in scale focusing. Scale focusing is conceptualized as the process of a movement organization intentionally localizing and particularizing its strategies. STP does scale focusing in three ways: critiquing the local built environment, articulating a geographically bounded collective identity, and deploying community-based strategies such as information dissemination and participating in local electoral politics. Since scale focusing represents a generative contribution to the social movements literature, we conclude by considering the broader imp...