Acting Locally: the character, contexts and significance of local environmental mobilizations’

Local environmental campaigns are ubiquitous and recurrent, even in times when environmental issues are not salient on national agenda. Yet their relationship to translocal environmental movements and issues has been relatively neglected. Local environmental campaigners are variously related to national and local organisations, and the peculiarities of place are one factor in that variation. But place itself acquires meaning through campaigns, and communities forge identity even as they mobilise against threats to their survival. The relationship between local campaigns and global environmental issues is problematic, but the ways in which local mobilisations often combine issues of environment, economic justice and democracy mirror the emerging agenda of transnational environmentalism.