- Convenors:
-
Markus Rauchecker
(Institute for Social-Ecological Research)
David Kuhn (Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE))
Alessandra Manzini (PLACES Lab, CY Paris University)
- Format:
- Roundtable
Format/Structure
Discussion forum with short inputs by the participants followed by a question based discussion
Long Abstract
Environmental conflicts over exploitation of nature frequently entail different forms of acting or resisting by diverse groups and individuals, including such as peasants, indigenous groups, environmentalists, international NGOs, and sometimes also more-than-human entities. Within environmental conflict and social movement studies, there is growing attention to the important role of coalitions and alliances in shaping environmental struggles towards more just and sustainable outcomes. Some authors also advocate for alliances between social groups and more-than-human entities. However, alliance building is a process of aligning mutual concerns of two or more conflict parties while dismissing other concerns. Eventually, alliance building can therefore also lead to the exclusion of specific actor groups or individuals even if they originally were part of one conflict party. Further focus on how coalitions and alliances produce both inclusions and exclusions may help not only to understand why some social groups and their concerns are left behind in environmental struggles, but also how these processes shape the manifold pathways of environmental conflicts.
This panel aims to explore the dynamics of alliance building in environmental struggles, including the role of more-than-human entities and processes of exclusion. We consider here all forms of possible alliances, collaborations, planned and unplanned coalitions between, for example, marginalized groups and environmental groups, between different movements, between social groups and more-than-human entities. We welcome contributions that address aspects linked to the following questions: 1) How do environmental conflicts create ground for new alliances? 2) What kind of alliances are formed, to the cost and benefit of whom and what? 3) How are marginal groups aligning with new partners such as companies and more-than-human entities? 4) What are the factors hindering or facilitating alliances? 5) How do alliances shape environmental struggles? 6) How can we make sense of alliances conceptually and research them methodologically?
Accepted papers
Contribution short abstract
The presentation examines a German climate-labour coalition to show how alliances between unions and environmental groups can build power for a just green transition, to understand what factors support their success, and how they might affect the future of environmental struggle in Europe.
Contribution long abstract
My research contributes to the relatively recent call for a climate-labour turn. This turn positions the alliance building between the climate and labour movements as crucial for developing a strong counter-hegemonic movement with the power to push for a just green transition and confront the forces of capitalism. To understand the conditions and strategies necessary to foster such climate-labour coalitions, I investigated the case of “Wir Fahren Zusammen” (WFZ), a German alliance between the public transport department of the labour union ver.di and the German branch of Fridays for Future. Based in eco-Marxism and ideology theory, I analysed the ideological and material conditions that formed the coalition as well as how praxis affected coalition members’ ideology. This was done through interviews with 13 members of the coalition, as well as analysis of several documents that played a role in the coalition’s work. The findings demonstrated that a coalition needs (1) a unifying campaign set-up by centring working class conditions, (2) a material base for common goals, and (3) a strong interpersonal praxis of solidarity to successfully resist the hegemonic discourse of “jobs versus environment” (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2011). A central aspect of ideological transformation through praxis was the interpellation of public transport workers as active subjects of the green transition. My research can give a perspective on how climate-labour alliances function, how they might shape the future of environmental struggle, and what methodologies are suitable to research them.
Contribution short abstract
Evading modalities of movement of chamois and mountaineers in the Tatra mountains, form a more-than-human alliance that resists modernist conservation policies. Moreover, they are both actors in larger neoliberal, anthropocentric, and extractivist forces causing decay in the mountain ecosystem.
Contribution long abstract
Tatra National Park has governed the Tatra mountains since the mid-20th century through regulations enforced by rangers and legitimised by scientific research and public relations. This authority is concentrated in the figure of the endemic and endangered Tatra chamois.
Yet after nearly fifty years of research, employees remain uncertain about the chamois’ main threats, the causes of population fluctuations, and why the animal defies an imagined figure of a timid, rare endemic species by exhibiting synanthropic behaviour which is deemed “unnatural” by conservationists.
Mountaineers—framed as a threat to the chamois and as drivers of its synanthropy—use infrapolitical bodily tactics (Scott 1985, 1990) to evade park oversight, control, and sanctions. They also ally with synanthropic chamois-as-friend, further undermining conservation policies and their legitimacy.
I argue that these evading modalities of movement of both chamois and mountaineers, form a more-than-human alliance that resists protectionist epistemology, modernist relation to nature (Descola 1996) as well as assumptions of care and justice rooted in “knowledge-as-illumination,” itself entangled with colonial and extractivist violence (Neimanis 2023).
I draw on a twelve-month multispecies ethnography following researchers, chamois, and mountaineers—walking, sneaking, hiding, climbing, and collecting excrement with them.
To avoid romanticising either group, I delink resistance from progressivist emancipatory teleology or subaltern heroism (Hoodfar 1997; Mahmood 2005). Instead, I position my arguent within broader environmental struggles in which both the Tatras and the park are shaped by neoliberal, anthropocentric, and extractivist forces contributing to the decay of the institution and the mountain ecosystem.
Contribution short abstract
Social-ecological coalitions between human groups and other-than-humans emerge in conflicts from their reinforcing effects on the conflict and their spatiotemporal encounter. If the human groups and other-than-humans alter their effects and leave or enter the encounter, the coalitions change.
Contribution long abstract
Marginalized human groups, such as gendered, racialized and poor people, and other-than-humans, such as wild animals and weeds, are exploited and/or harmed. In our understanding, these human and other-than-human conflict parties can reinforce each other to challenge dominant coalitions favouring exploitation in social-ecological conflicts. In a social-ecological conflict, two or more social-ecological coalitions struggle over societal relations to nature (exploitation of vs. co-existence with nature). From the reinforcing effects of marginalized human groups and other-than-humans on the conflicts, social-ecological coalitions emerge. We introduce the term effects instead of actions to also cover other-than-humans. Furthermore, for a social-ecological coalition – and a conflict between them – it is necessary that human and other-than-human parties encounter in a certain space and time. If human and other-than-human conflict parties leave or enter the spatiotemporal encounter and if they alter their effects on the conflict, the social-ecological coalitions change. In the case of a local conflict over agro-industrial soy cultivation in Argentina, other-than-humans reinforce human conflict parties in different aspects. The contamination of nature and especially amphibians and fish with pesticides mobilized the local population to pressure for a pesticide-free buffer zone. The sudden dieback of plants indicated pesticide spraying in the established pesticide-free buffer zone and enabled visual inspections by the neighbourhood initiative. Herbicide-resistant weeds, which compete with soy plants on the fields, did not play a role in difference to other cases, because their numbers were limited. We extend the discussion of the role of alliances in environmental conflicts by integrating other-than-humans.
Contribution short abstract
SPIRAL’s project shows that in societies were sacred forests are present and respected; authority is rooted in reciprocal relations with non humans-more-than-humans. The paper argues that sacred forests are places of resistance to extraction and extroversion of resources and value's systems.
Contribution long abstract
SPIRAL’s cross-cultural study of spiritual landscapes shows that in 72 small-scale societies worldwide were sacred forests are present, governance and customary law are rooted in reciprocal relations with the spiritual realm, extending authority beyond human institutions and emphasizing multisensorial interconnectedness in everyday heritage practices. This paper examines active spirits’ agency in both relational governance and environmental struggles, arguing that non-humans perform as political actors that mandate, adjudicate, and shape socio-ecological governance within spiritual landscapes were sacred forests are respected.
Combining knowledge co-generated during SPIRAL research project, with global cases from the Environmental Justice Atlas, the paper identifies a strong correlation between high-intensity conflicts and the presence of sacred forest ecosystems. This pattern suggests distinctive relational bonds among humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans within onto-epistemological frameworks redefined as 'cosmoecologies'.
A second line of inquiry examines evidence linking the intensity of resistance to extractive projects, the variety of mobilisations with the formation of strong international socio-ecological alliances. The paper concludes by outlining possible qualitative action-research approaches for assessing the strength and quality of bonds within transnational, intergenerational alliances.
By foregrounding spirits’ agency alongside local and international coalition-building, this analysis illuminates how human and more-than-human alliances shape ecological struggles, cultivate healthier socio-ecological relations, and navigate the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion inherent in environmental resistance.
Contribution short abstract
To overcome disciplinary silos and integrate different strands of research, we developed a typology of company-community environmental governance and conceptualised four types of interactions with their outcome on natural common-pool resources.
Contribution long abstract
Scholars and practitioners seeking solutions to environmental degradation have increasingly paid attention to the interactions between companies and communities. However, research remains divided into Business and Management on one side and Environmental and Development Studies on the other. In this paper, we analyse how different streams of literature have conceptualised and addressed the interactions between companies and communities in managing natural common-pool resources. We combine bibliometric techniques with an in-depth qualitative method to review 554 publications from the past 25 years. We provide three contributions. First, we identify the main theoretical frameworks and map the recent literature on our research topic, highlighting its fragmentation, which we define as the presence of distinct silos. Secondly, we introduce a typology of company-community environmental governance to highlight the convergences and differences across streams of literature. Thirdly, we propose a research agenda as a first step to guide explanatory interdisciplinary research on company-community environmental governance.
Contribution short abstract
This study analyzes socio-environmental movements in the Mar Menor (Spain), exploring how activists build human and more than human coalitions, mobilize discursive frameworks, and generate governance alternatives, including the lagoon’s legal personhood.
Contribution long abstract
Our research explores socio-environmental movements involved in conflicts over water in ecologically sensitive enclaves in Europe, focusing on the Mar Menor lagoon in Murcia, Spain. The Mar Menor is the first aquatic ecosystem in Europe to receive legal personhood, offering a unique case to examine how socio-environmental movements generate alternatives to the eco-social crisis.
Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with activists and legal experts, participant observation, and field journals, the study analyzes how movements participate in and develop narratives about coalitions between human and more-than-human actors in the territory—including agro-industrial systems, pig farms, historical mining residues, and ecological restoration initiatives—and how these coalitions trigger conflicts and innovations in socio-ecological governance. The research highlights how activists mobilize discursive frameworks to defend the ecosystem, engage citizen participation, and advocate for governance models that recognize nature as a rights-bearing entity.
By situating the Mar Menor case within broader debates on eco-social conflict, rights of nature, and socio-environmental activism, this study demonstrates how grassroots movements transform territorial, political, and social imaginaries. It also shows the potential of collective action to co-constitute socio-natural identities, shape governance alternatives, and influence institutional frameworks. This work contributes to understanding how socio-environmental movements in Europe navigate eco-social conflicts and actively produce knowledge, practices, and policies that advance environmental justice and sustainable governance of aquatic ecosystems.
Contribution short abstract
The contribution examines alliances formed and abandoned by activists opposing Tesla’s car factory in Germany. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it highlights conflicts over water, authoritarianism and capitalism within the movement.
Contribution long abstract
Immediately after Elon Musk announced that he would build a car factory in Grünheide, Germany, environmental activists were alerted and organized resistance against the project. They therefore united neighbours from different political backgrounds. Their reasons to protest were thus various, causing controversies about the aims of the protest. The parts of the protest that rejected the factory and criticized its capitalist logic in a more general way prevailed. They therefore sacrificed more reformist, liberal and conservative positions in the protest, aligning instead with a global climate justice movement. Based on a fundamental critique of capitalism they started connecting with urban anticapitalist groups in Germany, rural activists in France and anti-extractivism activists from Chile. Water became a unifying theme. On the other hand the total rejection of the factory itself became one factor to hinder an alliance with unionized workforce of the factory. Being both confronted with largely antidemocratic dynamics in and around the factory and with bounding concepts of the metabolic rift and a double exploitation, this mutual ground could have only been used poorly for a practical alliance between workers and climate activists. An environment-vs-jobs-dilemma could have not been overcome so far. In my contribution I want to elaborate on these dynamics, the ground for existing alliances and the hindering factors for others. I therefore rely on data from my ethnographic fieldwork in Grünheide.