Grassroots Social Movements Research Articles

The Role of NGOs in Building CSR Discourse around Human Rights in Developing Countries

As a response to increasing influences of transnational corporations (TNCs) over the lives of the poor, development NGOs have tried to promote their responsibility in cooperative ways: partnership in development projects and voluntary regulations. Notwithstanding some degree of success, these cooperative ways have failed to bring fundamental changes to TNCs. This article outlines the limitations of the mainstream corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the potential of grassroots social movements to make TNCs accountable. People in developing countries have been neglected in the CSR agenda; however, they have power to change corporations as labourers, consumers and citizens. Drawing on case studies, this article suggests that NGOs should support grassroots people in building global networks, constructing collective values and creating the information flow in order to overcome the current shortcomings of community-driven social movements. For these new roles as advocates and facilitators for grassroots movements, NGOs need to transform themselves by pursuing core values.

The Home Rule Advantage: Motives and Outcomes of Local Anti-fracking Mobilization

The professionalization of environmental advocacy in the United States has pushed grassroots environmental activists to the margins of federal and state policy arenas. Frequently, individuals or communities who will be directly affected by environmental policy decisions are excluded from participating in policy discussions. Unable to compete with professionalized, national environmental organizations for legislative influence, informal, grassroots environmentalists are compelled to test out new models of organizing that leverage political power outside of institutionally sanctioned venues. This article examines the motives and outcomes of a grassroots social movement to prohibit unconventional shale development (“fracking”) through exercising home rule authorities in rural Southern Illinois. In Illinois, grassroots anti-fracking activists initially collaborated with a statewide coalition of environmental organizations lobbying for a moratorium on fracking in the state. I examine how conflict between coalition partners pushed grassroots anti-fracking activists to adopt new, localized models of organizing to achieve their policy goals. In these local efforts, I find that the same structural features of grassroots groups that enable strategic innovation also prevent the dispersion of authority in informal groups, ultimately undermining their creative capacity.

Ethnic Studies as a Site for Political Education: Critical Service Learning and the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights

ABSTRACTService learning in political science is driven by a commitment to expanding what is meant by civic education. Following this tradition, this article presents an example of a course informed by critical service learning centered in a grassroots social movement. Partnered with the California Domestic Workers Coalition and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, this course involved students in direct political engagement to explore cultural citizenship, the legislative process, and the possibilities and limitations of grassroots movements for social change. Challenging traditional notions of what counts as service and who counts as an expert, the example of this course speaks to the promise of service learning pedagogy as a strategy to connect students in meaningful ways to critical social issues and as a tool for political education.

Mediated Digital Activism: A Critical Assessment of Opportunities, Promises and Problems of Social Media Uses in Contemporary Grassroots Movements

The rapid development and widespread and increasing use of Social Networking sites is arguably one the most significant developments in contemporary human communication over the past two decades. Indeed, perhaps comparable only to development of mobile communication technologies, social networking may well be one of the most important and visible forms of human interaction since the invention of the Internet. In this paper, we examine and highlight the enormous potential of these fairly recent technological developments and highlight opportunities they present to humankind as platforms for democratic and participatory communication and governance - especially in grassroots social movements activism. While doing so, we use cases to show the important potential and actual contributions that social media hold out and represent for democratic communication. The paper also casts a critical look at the potential risks and examines proven and theoretical shortcomings and challenges that these new advances in human communication may pose or represent for society, and identify cybercrime, cyber bullying, their effects on human physical and emotional health, their impact on productivity and other workplace complications, and potential societal disorder and dysfunction of certain social norms among the list of concerns that we suggest require further reflection and redress. The paper concludes by depicting social media as a potentially useful tool from which much social and societal capital can be derived; but also draws attention to their many problematic aspects that make them seem like double-edged sword – with enormous opportunities and benefits on the one hand, and risks and threats, on the other, depending primarily on the uses to which they are put. Global, regional and national initiatives should be taken to maximize the benefits of social media while minimizing, or at least containing the threats through incorporation of independent but limited guidelines and regulations that would safeguard people’s freedoms and rights while protecting users from abuses and adverse effects often inherent in new developments.

Cultivating Better Food Access? The Role of Farmers' Markets in the U.S. Local Food Movement

AbstractThe local food movement has grown substantially in the United States in recent years. Proponents have hailed this growth as a shift away from a conventional food system rife with inequality toward one that introduces more just outcomes for society. While the movement's development and popularity have proliferated, little research has examined nationally how successful it is at delivering on its promises. By combining the social movement and food system literatures with quantitative methodology, this article examines the accessibility of the farmers' market across the United States. Using multivariate logistic regression, the analysis focuses on several identifying characteristics of individuals within and characteristics of neighborhoods across the United States to explore what increases (or decreases) the likelihood of a farmers' market being located within their boundaries. The results suggest that several social, economic, and racial differences exist between those living in areas with farmers' markets and those in areas that do not. Additionally, the analysis found that several neighborhood characteristics significantly influence the likelihood of a farmers’ market being present, including a neighborhood's socioeconomic status, the quality of neighborhood infrastructure, participation rates in social support programs, and the prevalence of poverty. In addition to posing questions of accessibility for the local food movement this research contributes to our understanding of grassroots social movements by examining the avenues and potential limitations that they negotiate while ensuring their stated goals are reached.

A TRANSNATIONAL AGRI-FOOD SYSTEM FOR WHOM? THE STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY AT RIO+20

ABSTRACT Food has been one of the most debated and contested discourses in recent global environmental governance without this fact being reflected, however, in management and organizational studies (MOS). In this paper, we analyze the different positions taken in relation to the transnational agri-food system by the state sector, the private sector and civil society actors and we map key differences and similarities in the discourses of these groups at the influential 2012 Rio+20 Conference. Using neo-Gramscian discourse theory, we uncover the different politico-economic interests that exist and show how these different actors deal with the agri-food system. We demonstrate that international NGOs and grassroots social movements are very diverse in how they approach the question of food security, which in turn is reflected in how they vary in their approach to doing politics. This analysis contributes to our understanding of how hegemony is organized, highlighting the important role of different civil society actors in either maintaining or resisting hegemonic approaches to the transnational agri-food system.

Critical pedagogy and the fierce urgency of now: opening up space for critical reflections on the U.S. civil rights movement

This manuscript engages with the U.S. civil rights movement and offers reflections on how critical scholarship and pedagogy can benefit from a robust engagement with the African American freedom struggle. While widely studied in other disciplines and despite the work of some very committed geographers, the U.S. civil rights movement has enjoyed less critical scrutiny within the broader discipline. More specifically, I outline a set of broader concepts that can be utilized and which illustrate the power of grass-roots social movements to change oppressive social conditions. This has implications not only for social and cultural geography, but also for the ways we engage in the hard and often unrewarded work of classroom engagement and teaching.

Human Rights, Environmental Justice, and the North-South Divide

From the Ogoni people devastated by oil drilling in Nigeria to the Inuit and other indigenous populations threatened by climate change, communities disparately burdened by environmental degradation are increasingly framing their demands for environmental justice in the language of environmental human rights. However, some scholars have expressed scepticism about the environmental human rights project. First, they remind us that the human rights governance capacity of many states in the global South has been compromised by the neoliberal economic reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as by trade and investment agreements. Second, they question the ability of human rights law to adequately articulate and advance the aspirations and resistance strategies of diverse grassroots social justice movements, and warn us about the susceptibility of human rights law to co-optation by powerful Northern states. This Chapter examines the promise and the peril of environmental human rights as a means of challenging environmental injustice within nations and the North-South dimension of environmental injustice.

Conflictual and cooperative childcare politics in Canada

In 2005, after many years of inaction, the Canadian government seemed poised to make real changes to national childcare policy?a marker of social movement success for the grassroots Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC). In this paper, we analyse childcare policy developments in Canada between 2003 and 2005, drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with CCAAC staff and members, allies from other national childcare organizations, and former elected government officials and policy makers. Given its role as a grassroots social movement organization and not a professional association (which can be more closely aligned with governments), we hypothesized that the CCAAC would take a conflictual approach to the federal government’s policy initiative. Our close analysis of interviews with CCAAC staff, their allies and elected government officials and civil servants instead reveals conflictual and cooperative relations (Giugni and Passy, In: From contention to democracy. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield. 1998) during this important period. Our discussion explores some possible conditions in the sociopolitical environment and the internal structure of CCAAC that account for this conflictual-cooperation SMO?government relationship from 2003 to 2005.

Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: An Intersectional Model for Understanding Disaster Ten Years after Hurricane Katrina

The year 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall just outside of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Critical narratives point to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. However, most Katrina discourse has been limited by its neglect of intersectional feminist analysis. In this article I introduce a model for making intersectional sense of Hurricane Katrina with lessons for the study of other disasters. By intersectional I mean a gender- and race-conscious framework that exposes the way in which structural sexism and racism came together to produce the disaster and even the social justice response to it. Following Naomi Klein’s (2005) use of the term “disaster capitalism,” I call the intersectional formation “racialized disaster patriarchy” as it refers to political, institutional, organizational, and cultural practices that converge before, during, and after disaster to produce injustice. Disaster patriarchy links the intersectional experience of disaster to the experience of recovery and the politics of the grassroots social movement for a just reconstruction.

Social activism on social networks sites

From the very beginning the internet has been often perceived as a miraculous cure for accumulated social problems of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and, in the same time and perhaps more often, has been denied any activistic potential. The aim of this paper was to explore and identify the real potential of the internet as a mean of civic activism. At the theoretical level, the internet is defined as a technology that can be used to support but also to undermine the social hierarchy, as such representing Feenberg's (2002) two fundamental principles of each technology functioning. In this regard, starting from Castells (Kastels 2014) idea that citizens via the internet may undermine one of the two fundamental sources of power-the power of communication. At the analytic level activist role of the internet is broken down into informational, organizational and public in order to empirically investigate the potential of the grassroots social movements that operates on social networking sites in Serbia.

Book Review: African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence, by Peter Dwyer & Leo Zeilig

Peter Dwyer & Leo Zeilig African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence, Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2012; 260 pp: 9781608461202, $17 (pbk) Peter Dwyer (Ruskin College) and Leo Zeilig (Institute of Commonwealth Studies) present a history and analysis of social movements in African history. They argue that most survey texts in African studies neglect the role of grassroots social movements, tending instead to portray Africa from the perspective of political and economic elites, whether imperialist or anti-imperialist. The result is that politics is reduced to issues of 'governance', and social movements are conflated with 'civil society' (p. 4). Therefore, Dwyer and Zeilig contend that 'social movements--popular movements of the working class, the poor, and other oppressed and marginalised sections of African society--have played a central role in shaping Africa's contemporary history' (p. 1). The authors define social movements as less institutional than 'civil society' or 'interest groups', which tend to address conflicts within existing political frameworks. They argue that social movements can take an institutionalised shape, but that they are often amorphous so to coalesce briefly around a particular issue or initiative before dissolving into wider society' (p. 23). Dwyer and Zeilig therefore make sharp distinctions between subaltern, 'grassroots' movements and predominately urban and donor-dependent NGOs. The latter are often entrenched in the political mainstream and therefore unable to enact meaningful social and economic change. This is not to say that Dwyer and Zeilig discount any usefulness of mainstream NGOs; they merely argue that 'independently minded civil society activists [must] break free of donor dependency and adopt a more critical attitude to the governments they had (in part) helped bring to power (p. 130). This means engagement with grassroots organisations and trade unions. Based on this framework, they present a post-1940s history of Africa divided into three cycles of protest'. First, the post-Second World War movements for independence leading up to the mid-1960s, when most African states achieved political independence. Second, the responses to the first wave of structural adjustment programmes in the late 1970s. Third, the merging of economic grievances with demands for democratic reform in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dwyer and Zeilig acknowledge some of the limitations of 1950s and 1960s African nationalism, noting the role of the educated elite in solidifying state control and 'suffocating' independent working-class politics (p. …

Self-Determined Citizens? New Forms of Civic Activism and Citizenship in Armenia

This article examines the recent emergence and growth of grassroots social movements in Armenia which are locally known as ‘civic initiatives’. It considers what their emergence tells us about the development of civil society and the changing understandings and practices of citizenship in Armenia in the post-Soviet period. It analyses why civic initiatives explicitly reject and distance themselves from formal, professionalised NGOs and what new models of civic activism and citizenship they have introduced. It argues that civic initiatives embrace a more political understanding of civil society than that which was introduced by Western donors in the 1990s.

Critical Food Systems Education and the Question of Race

Studies of food systems education have largely avoided questions concerning race. In this commentary, we interrogate the racial assumptions behind certain food systems education projects. Food systems educators are often motivated by a whitened cultural desire to bring good food to others and see garden-based learning projects, which seek to instill healthy nutritional behaviors, as the solution to the problem of purported food deserts. We argue that food systems education is in need of a critical intervention. In this commentary, we propose critical food systems education (CFSE) as a theoretical framework, set of pedagogies, and vision for policy that moves beyond teaching students about the food system, and helps them realize their potential to structurally transform it through collective action. The CFSE perspective is theoretically grounded in food justice, food sovereignty, political agroecology, and critical pedagogy. The CFSE approach is not merely theoretical, but arises from the examples of grassroots social movements throughout the world that have developed radical forms of food systems education. We highlight this approach using the example of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST). The MST opposes a racialized discourse of the peasantry as backwards and ignorant. The movement's leaders reject a vision of education that reproduces white modernity, and instead support a vision that advances radical agroecological education programs that train students to be political subjects capable of creating a socially and environmentally equitable food system. The example of the MST underscores the potential of CFSE as a corrective for the food systems education's racialized assumptions.

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Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

We Can't Go on Meeting Like This

This essay opens up an investigation into the physical, ‘face-to-face’ meeting as one of the most enduring yet understudied practices in the creation and maintenance of human organizations. Research on corporate management over the last 30 years has treated the group meeting as largely a dysfunctional waste of resources and continues to recommend myriad ways towards its management Yet over the same period, the meeting – in the form of the general assembly in a public square - has become the fetishized object and process for a constellation of urban mass protests across the world over the last decade. Within these politically charged events, subsequently framed as marking a series of watersheds in the transformation of cultures of mass political organization, methods of ‘leaderless’ consensus decision-making inherited from earlier grassroots social movements in the 20th century have been widely adopted in surprisingly uniform and prescriptive ways. Within contemporary art over the same period, institutional critique has given way to related experiments with varieties of group talk and deliberation that have been shaped around a DIY, counter-institutional agenda. Exploring the divergences and convergences between these varieties of organizational culture, this essay considers the meeting as the most persistent and essential means through which organizations, institutions and networks invent and perpetuate themselves, diverse acts whose specific aesthetic, performative and symbolic qualities have, with some notable exceptions, been relatively under-explored. Taking performance as a means for experimentation with the forms of social existence and drawing on insights from the less well-known psychoanalytic traditions of group analysis and group relations, it convenes an enlarged plurality of discourses with which to explore the psychosocial life of meetings beyond received forms of corporate efficiency, vanguard assemblyism or artistic dialogism.

The Politics of Bureaucracy

The Politics of Bureaucracy Nancy Beck Young (bio) Joanna L. Grisinger. The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. vii + 309 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $88.00 (cloth); $31.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader). Gail Radford. The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. vii + 218 pp. Illustration, maps, appendix, notes, and index. $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper). Why does a country with so many governing entities and countless overlapping jurisdictions—this is a construct that goes beyond the simple local, state, federal and the legislative, executive, judicial dichotomies—have a population that thinks in a singular grammatical construction about “the government”? This is a difficult question in no small part because historians have just begun to tackle questions regarding governing entities not defined in the Constitution. Popular visions of governance are linked to what the Founders created, and indeed our language for discussing government comes from the early national period when the Constitution was adopted. Writings in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison help frame how Americans often think about government. Hamilton's observation in Federalist No. 81 speaks to the importance of the Constitution: “The Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution.” Beyond the Constitution, governmental structure is probably the second significant marker in the way citizens think about government. Hamilton and Madison spoke positively about the division of government: In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people, is submitted to the administration of a single government; and usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each, subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises [End Page 327] on the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other; at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.1 Madison believed this structure would ensure a measured, deliberative process wherein change would be cumbersome and slow in coming—anything but the structures of governance that Joanna L. Grisinger and Gail Radford explicate. For scholars working today on appointed governing entities, the meaning of the Constitution and the division of government are central underlying themes, but little in political history has addressed these matters. Until recently, the historiography of American politics has been focused on one or more of the following: sociocultural issues, ideology, the construction and impact of legislation, grass-roots social movements, institutions like Congress and the courts, biographies, and supposedly discrete political eras (for example, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan years). Aside from presidential and sometimes congressional studies, less attention has been given to questions about who is doing the governing, for what purpose, and how that governing is happening. Instead such scholarship has more often been the domain of political scientists and public administration scholars. At the federal level, a mushrooming bureaucracy, mostly a twentieth-century development created in part by legislation that Congress passed and in part by presidential executive order, has assumed quasi-legislative, executive, and even judicial functioning without the democratic accountability under which the three branches of government operate. Some scholars, particularly Brian Balogh, have found credible evidence of an activist federal government in the nineteenth century, raising a host of questions regarding how we define government activism.2 This twentieth-century bureaucracy, though, is different; it includes entities that are hybrid creatures, partially governmental and partially private. The situation becomes even more complex at the state and local levels. Two new books—Gail Radford's The Rise of Public Authority and Joanna L. Grisinger's The Unwieldy American State—provide much-needed relief to this historiographic problem. Grisinger's book, published in 2012, explicates federal-level administrative law in the years since the 1930s, with the focus on the 1940s and 1950s. Her concern is less with...

Tweeting, re-tweeting, and commenting: microblogging and social movements in China

With increased research attention being paid to the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social movements during the Arab Spring, the role of new and social media in promoting social movements in China is examined in depth. Focusing on the most popular social media platform in China, Weibo, this research includes a review of new scholarship about ICTs and social movements, analysis of Chinese grassroots social movements organized via Weibo, and the limitations of these social movements. The guiding question here is how individual Chinese citizens strategically used Weibo to facilitate social movements.

Media Activism from Above and Below: Lessons from the 1940s American Reform Movement

Abstract The 1940s was a contentious decade for US media policy. Activists, policymakers, and communication industries grappled over media's normative foundations and regulatory guidelines. At this time, a reform agenda was taking shape at both the grassroots social movement level and inside elite policy circles. This paper examines the tensions within this nascent media reform movement, many of which are still negotiated among media activists today. By recovering contingency and conflict, this research sheds light on larger paradigmatic shifts. It suggests that despite significant reform activism in the 1940s, a commercial, self-regulated media system emerged largely inoculated against further structural challenges. The failures of this reform movement hold important lessons for contemporary activists.