Grassroots Environmental Governance (Routledge Research in Global Environmental Governance)

Grassroots movements can pose serious challenges to both governments and corporations. However, grassroots actors possess a variety of motivations, and their visions of development may evolve in complex ways. Meanwhile, their relative powerlessness obliges them to forge an array of shifting alliances and to devise a range of adaptive strategies.

Grassroots Environmental Governance presents a compilation of in-depth ethnographic case studies, based on original research. Each of the chapters focuses specifically on grassroots engagements with the agents of various forms of industrial development. The book is geographically diverse, including analyses of groups based in both the global North and South, and represents a range of disciplinary perspectives. This allows the collection to explore themes that cross-cut specific localities and disciplinary boundaries, and thus to generate important theoretical insights into the complexities of grassroots engagements with industry.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental activism, environmental governance, and environmental studies in general.

Leah S. Horowitz is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.

Michael J. Watts is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.