• Causes

Causes

Drawing on new perspectives for analysing social movements, this paper blends a variety of concepts – political opportunity structure, micro-mobilisation contexts, collective identity formation, framing processes and mobilising strategies – to examine the formation of the Brazilian environmental movement from the 1970s through to the 1990s. It explains why the Brazilian environmental movement emerged when and as it did, how activists gathered in groups and networks, and which strategies they constructed in order to mobilise.

Relying on a conceptual synthesis provided by Political Processes Theory, the analysis identifies three "political opportunity structures" or contexts, which were decisive to the movement formation:

• re-democratisation created incentives for independent environmental groups to get organised in the context of a huge cycle of protests. In this way, it was decisive in converting individuals sympathetic to the environmental cause into activists
• during the Constituent Assembly, a decision about mobilising strategies had to be made. At this time, the groups opted for a network of associations, instead of parties, as the best way to present their claims in the public sphere
• the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 forced the coalition of associations to broaden the meaning of their particular frames in order to merge them into one that could be shared by the whole movement.

At these points, various groups were able to overcome disagreements during crucial moments in order to present themselves publicly as a strong and large coalition – a social movement – instead of as a fragmented web of separate groups.

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