Social movement organizations agency for sustainable organizing

Public outcry over environmental issues has taken on stellar proportions in the past few years. We currently witness an intense struggle over meaning around climate change between economic, political and civil society actors and it is not clear which narrative will win . Conceptualizations range from populist views of climate denialism to neoliberal views of technological progress and faith in the efficiency of capital markets, and from idealist views of mobilization and the potential for positive disruptive change of the climate movement to critical realist apocalyptic views which call for deep adaptation to the probable (if not inevitable) breakdown of industrial consumer societies. All these narratives are advanced by a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs). Social movements, in brief, “are one of the principal social forms through which collectivities give voice to their grievances and concerns about the rights, welfare, and well-being of themselves and others by engaging in various types of collective action” (Snow, Soule & Kriesi, 2004: 3). In this chapter we focus on such civil society actors and their agency for sustainable organ- izing because their influence has been significantly amplified over recent years, and these organizations increasingly attract scholarly interest across academic disciplines.