Abstract
This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a “Copenhagen narrative” to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.
Highlights
This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective
We demonstrate our theory with an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization for the COP21 climate change conference in Paris, 2015.2 We show how narrative processes shaped the movement’s strategic response to the political opportunity structures (POSs) of the UN climate process in general and COP21 in particular, which presented both opportunities and threats
Our study starts by identifying how the retrospective BCopenhagen narrative^ was recalled in the context of mobilizing for COP21 and how it was integrated into the prospective BParis narrative.^ We show how these narratives—though referring to Breal^ events—were reconstructed to support strategizing for COP21
Summary
This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015 This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. There is some evidence to support this idea, yet it is far from conclusive (de Moor 2016a) To advance this debate, we propose a new model that combines the Bperception hypothesis^ with insights from narrative analysis, which has remained largely detached from structural approaches like POS theory. We argue that while movement actors may perceive, and adapt to, structural features of the political context, these activities take place within wider processes in which social movements construct stories about themselves in relation to their environment, as well as their history, presence, and projected future. This helps explain why some narratives outweigh others and why some opportunities are sometimes not responded to— something extant theories have been insufficiently capable of doing
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