The Characteristics, Activities and Goals of Environmental Organizations Engaged in Advocacy Within the Australian Environmental Movement

ABSTRACT

A sustained groundswell of grassroots advocacy is required to trigger the urgent action required to solve our many global environmental problems. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics, issue focus, tactics and targets of this grassroots advocacy, we analyzed the website communications of 497 environmental movement organizations (EMOs) undertaking advocacy in Australia. Findings indicate that Conservation and Protection issues continue to dominate, although a wave of new climate change-related issue groups have emerged in recent years. Almost half of all groups operate at a local level. EMO websites suggest that their actions are primarily normative (vs. radical), and focus primarily on information provision. Of the 960 campaign targets identified, just over half were political, however, climate change, renewable energy and sustainability campaigns more often targeted individuals or business entities. We identify the areas where further investigation could advance the research agenda on grassroots environmental advocacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental movement
• environmental communication
• environmental organizations
• advocacy
• campaigns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use the term “environmental movement” in line with previous research using an organization-centred approach to movement analysis, however, recent research on the spatial and social ecologies of social movements have also highlighted the role of non-organizational elements in social movements (Zhang & Zhao, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NZX42, or via anonymous link at https://osf.io/nzx42/?view_only=d2d6fd537af84678bf3d35513c1429df