From local conflict to national issue: when and how environmental campaigns succeed in transcending the local

Abstract

As power is increasingly removed from local to national and global arenas, local environmental activists struggle both to secure local redress of their grievances and to place their concerns on supra-local agendas. Yet some succeed in doing so. In order to elucidate the conditions that facilitate such successes, campaigns concerning three issues – road-building, waste incineration and airport expansion – are examined. In each, local campaigners in England have, at least briefly, achieved national attention. Local campaigns are most likely to succeed in elevating their concerns to the status of national issues where they frame those concerns as translocal issues by networking with others with similar grievances. They are most likely to do this with the assistance of non-local actors such as national environmental non-governmental organisations, assistance that is most likely to be provided where the issue concerns a problematic government policy, and to be sustained only so long as that issue is nationally salient and consistent with the campaign priorities of those organisations. The rise of climate change as the ‘master frame’ of environmentalism has had diverse implications for local campaigns.

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