Fragmented Community Action or New Social Movement?

Abstract

Environmentalism is usually regarded as a `First World' phenomenon associated with economic prosperity and rising living standards. This article examines environmentalism in the context of a `Third World' country, Jamaica. While the tourist industry successfully promotes Jamaica as an unspoiled tropical holiday destination, the country faces serious environmental threats from industry, agriculture and from tourism itself. Structural adjustment and stabilization programmes have cut deeply into government expenditure with a consequence that environmental protection has low priority. However, in Jamaica social action has emerged in response to environmental problems. Groups have begun to organize at national, parish and community level and have become vehicles for citizens to lobby, protest and campaign on a number of pressing ecological issues. This article seeks to establish if the emerging social action is most accurately categorized as fragmented community action or whether it amounts to a new social movement. The factors which have shaped and influenced the development of the `movement' are explored in the context of local, national and global processes which have given rise to the social action. The applicability of theories of new social movements in accounting for environmentalism in the `Third World' is discussed.