Interrogating socio-ecological coalitions: environmentalist engagements with labor and immigrants’ rights in the United States

ABSTRACT

To confront the powerful forces of neoliberalism and hyper-nationalism, alliances between social and environmental activists are necessary. However, efforts to forge effective cross-movement alliances often run-up against differences in core political values. How can we make sense of the political ideologies around which socio-ecological engagements coalesce or fracture? We outline an interpretive scheme that analyzes and compares the engagements between various types of social entities, particularly those seeking to bridge social and environmental politics. We then employ two case studies – environmentalists and labor unions, and environmentalists and immigrants’ rights groups in the United States – in order to illustrate the utility of the interpretive scheme. We conclude by arguing that this interpretive scheme can help identify sources of friction that arise in efforts to build socio-ecological coalitions, the grounds on which common ideological visions are negotiated, and the priorities of the resulting coalitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmentalism
• labor
• immigration
• alliance
• coalition
• social movements

Acknowledgement

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Environmental Politics editors for instructive comments. We also received helpful feedback from the Spring 2018 Sustainability and Social Justice class at Bennington College. An early version of this article was presented at the 2015 Western Political Science Association conference in Las Vegas, NV.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.