Environmental movements are networks of informal interactions that may include individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in collective action motivated by shared identity or concern about environmental issues. This article reviews literature on environmental movements (including antinuclear energy movements) according to four main aspects: the social bases and values underlying the movements’ mobilization, the resources support- ing their mobilization, the political opportunities channeling their mobilization, and the cultural framing processes through which environmental issues are defined as social and political problems to be addressed through mobilization. In addition, we consider the historical antecedents and roots of environmental movements. Finally, we discuss the interplay between the local and the global levels and the movements’ impacts, a long neglected issue in the social movement literature. Our review highlights three main features of environmental movements: they are heterogeneous; they have profoundly transformed themselves; and they have generally become more institutionalized.
Swiss cantons have extensive autonomy in implementing federal laws. This leads to heterogeneity in cantonal practices and policy outputs. This article explores the extent to which courts contribute to the convergence of cantonal outputs. It focuses on the disability insurance benefits granted by cantonal administrations, and on the related judicial rulings by cantonal courts and the Federal Supreme Court. The findings suggest that judgments of the Federal Supreme Court have a limited but positive impact on the harmonization of cantonal outputs when a major policy change is implemented.
This paper examines the impact of interactions with welfare institutions on the political participation of long-term unemployed youth in two cities. We assess the role of resource redistribution and of political learning on engagement in protest activities. We use a unique dataset of long-term unemployed youth to predict the probability that long-term unemployed youth participate in protest activities and become politically alienated as a result of their interactions with the state. Our study suggests that the impact of staid aid on political participation comes from providing services through the unemployment office and the social aid office rather than from direct payments. However, we do not find strong evidence revealing a process of political learning, as political alienation does not seem to mediate the effect of interactions with the state on protest. The most important finding of our study is that the connection between welfare institutions and political learning is context-dependent. We find a differential effect of interactions with the unemployment office and with the social aid office across cities.
Turning the Paris Agreement's greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes. Second, at the same time of the ballot, we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the Swiss population. Survey respondents are informed about environmental, distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design. These impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model. This original setting generates a series of novel results. Providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking. Making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs, e.g. social cushioning or recycling via lump-sum transfers. The case of lump-sum recycling is particularly striking: it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs, which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature.We show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists' prescriptions and the preferences of the general public.
The thematic and geographical expansion of EUmigration policies has gone along with an increasing mobilisation of pertinent international organisations such as the IOM and UNHCR. Combining insights from the external governance approach with IR debates on international institutional complexity, this article examines the dynamics behind this ‘multilevelling’ of EU external policies. Three strategies of institutional interplay are distinguished: counterweight, whereby international organisations act as independent complement or corrector to EU policy; subcontracting, referring to the outsourcing of EU project implementation to international organisations; and rule transmission, a process in which international organisations engage in transferring EU rules to third countries. Whereas greater organisational authority and autonomy have allowed the UNHCR to keep an independent voice as counterweight to EU action, both the UNHCR and IOM have become increasingly involved in the implementation of the EU’s ‘global approach’ to migration via subcontracting and rule transmission. In sum, these processes shed a new light on the role of the EU within the international migration regime complex.
Cette contribution a pour objectif d’étudier les processus de transfert de politiques publiques dans le champ du développement et de la lutte contre la pauvreté. À travers l’étude des Conditional Cash Transfers aux Philippines, nous tenterons de montrer comment cette politique, née dans les années 1990 en Amérique latine, a été mise à l’agenda du gouvernement philippin. Nous décrirons notamment quels rôles ont joué les Organisations internationales (OIS), et particulièrement la Banque mondiale, dans ces processus de transfert. Pour ce faire, nous soulignerons son rôle d’entrepreneur d’idées/normes ainsi que sa capacité de mise en réseau à travers le recours à des experts internationaux, favorisant des processus de lesson-drawing. Plus précisément, sur la base de notre travail de terrain, nous mettrons en avant l’importance des conférences, workshops et visites de terrain des « best cases », organisés par les OIS dans la légitimation de nouvelles politiques. Nos conclusions soulignent la transnationalisation des processus des processus d’élaboration des politiques publiques et la centralité des OIS dans celle-ci.
This paper develops an analytical approach to comparative political economy that focuses on the relative importance of different components of aggregate demand—in the first instance, exports and household consumption—and dynamic relations among the “demand drivers” of growth. We illustrate this approach by comparing patterns of economic growth in Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK over the period 1994-2007. Our discussion emphasizes that export-led growth and consumption-led growth have different implications for distributive conflict.
