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This article is derived from my 2024 ESS presidential address. I discuss my new book and how a sociological lens helps us to understand the process through which we can save ourselves from the climate crisis. After explaining why the state and the market have struggled to implement sufficient policies to address the climate crisis, I present the AnthroShift as a theory that explains how social actors reorient after risk pivots to open windows of opportunity for social change. I discuss why civil society is most likely to mobilize after there is a generalized sense of climate risk and summarize how climate activists are currently engaging in non‐violent civil disobedience as a first step in an expanded civil society sector that is likely to put pressure on the state and the market to help us save ourselves. I conclude by presenting three steps that can be taken to help us save ourselves from the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does collective identity form in virtual spaces and what role do hashtags play? This paper takes advantage of a unique dataset that includes surveys from activists who organized the nationally coordinated climate strikes in the US that began in spring 2019 to answer these questions. Building on the research about collective identity formation online and the role that hashtags play, we employ social network analysis to assess how collective identity forms online over three waves of protests. In particular, we analyze how activists involved in the youth climate movement used hashtags to project their collective identities and create collective narratives. Our findings show how hashtags use varied over the period of our study, in some cases indicating the formation of a thin collective identity. They also show that there are patterns in the ways hashtags are employed by activists in the movement that suggest the formation of subaltern narratives among those affiliated with youth-led groups. Our paper concludes by considering how this finding helps us understand collective identity in virtual spaces and the role that hashtags play more specifically within social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an environment that is high in racial justice saliency, how do identities inform motivation for supporting specific issues in the crowd? This study examines the role that intersectionality played in mobilizing participants to join the mass demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Building on recent studies that show how protest participants connect issue-based concerns with their identities to boost support for movements, we analyze data collected through surveys with a random sample of activists participating in the protests after George Floyd’s death in Washington, DC, in 2020. We find that intersectional motivations played a significant role in mobilizing protest participants. Analysis of these factors helps explain the diversity of the crowd and provides insights into how the movement may contribute to greater success for racial justice and the degree to which the movement has staying power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, sociologists who study society and the environment have focused on resolving the debate regarding the relationship between economic development and environmental degradation. Studies from a family of critical perspectives tend to find that economic development is antithetical to environmental protection, whereas a suite of more optimistic perspectives has uncovered more hopeful findings. We attempt to resolve these differences by situating this debate within the larger framework of the anthro-shift. The anthro-shift explains how the society-environment relationship changes over time. The theory assumes this relationship is the product of interrelations among the state, market, and civil society sectors. We focus on two distinctive qualities of the anthro-shift: the role risk plays as a pivot for reorienting how society interacts with the natural environment and the multidirectionality of the theory, highlighting how it combines elements of many of the dominant critical and optimistic perspectives into a broader framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Donald Trump's inauguration, large‐scale protest events have taken place around the United States, with many of the biggest events being held in Washington, DC. The streets of the nation's capital have been flooded with people marching about a diversity of progressive issues, including women's rights, climate change, and gun violence. Although research has found that these events have mobilized a high proportion of repeat participants who come out again and again, limited research has focused on understanding differential participation in protest, especially during one cycle of contention. This article, accordingly, explores the patterns among the protest participants to understand differential participation and what we refer to as "persistence in the Resistance." In it, we analyze a unique data set collected from surveys conducted with a field approximation of a random sample of protest participants at the largest protest events in Washington, DC, since the Resistance began at the 2017 Women's March. Our findings provide insights into repeat protesters during this cycle of contention. The article concludes by discussing how our findings contribute to the research on differential participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on recent research on polycentric governance and the Ecology of Games to understand climate politics in the USA. Complementing previous work from 2005 to 2009, we map out the ideological networks of political actors engaged in the climate policy network using data from the US Congress as an arena of symbolic interaction. Our analysis identifies polycentric sites of ideological congruence and conflict in the discourse network on climate change. Political actors from different levels and including several actor types formed multiple centers that became bipolarized between the 112th and 114th sessions of the US Congress. This process took place in tandem with the increased participation of subnational actors in the polycentric system. By the 114th session of the Congress—during which the 2016 election took place—subnational policy actors, along with a diversity of other actors, contributed to an extremely polarized discussion of one of the central policies in the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan: the Clean Power Plan. This finding is remarkable as the concept of polycentricity tends to be normatively associated with policy innovation, rather than stagnation. Our longitudinal analysis demonstrates, using Discourse Network Analysis, how increased multi-level participation can be associated with policy blockage of progressive climate policies rather than enabling policy innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how school gardens provide learning opportunities for school-aged children while concurrently helping cities achieve sustainability. The authors analyse this process in Washington, DC, a particularly innovative metropolis in the United States. This national capital city boasts two of the most progressive examples of legislation aimed at improving environmental awareness and inciting citizens to engage in environmental stewardship, both of which focus on school-aged children: (1) the Healthy Schools Act of 2010 and (2) the Sustainable DC Act of 2012. Together these policies focus on bringing healthy lifestyles and environmental awareness, including meaningful outdoor learning experiences, to students and families in the District of Columbia. This article is organised into three parts. The first part discusses how Washington, DC became a sustainable learning city through the implementation of these specific policies. The next part presents the results of a pilot study conducted in one kindergarten to Grade 5 (K-5) elementary school located in Ward 8, the poorest part of the city. The authors’ analysis considers the support and the obstacles teachers and principals in the District of Columbia (DC) are experiencing in their efforts to integrate school gardens into the curriculum and the culture of their schools. Exploring the impacts of the school garden on the students, the local community, and the inter-generational relationships at and beyond schools, the authors aim to shed light on the benefits and the challenges. While Washington, DC is fostering its hope that the benefits prevail as it provides a model for other cities to follow, the authors also candidly present the challenges of implementing these policies. In the final part, they discuss the implications of their findings for school gardens and sustainable learning cities more broadly. They encourage further research to gain more insights into effective ways of promoting environmental literacy and to consolidate the transferability of this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her recent piece, MacKendrick (2017) asks whether we are experiencing a “new wave of science activism” and outlines various visible and vocal forms of political action taken by scientists in recent months. Coming from a slightly different perspective, this piece looks at scientists as part of the broader Resistance—people working individually and in collectivities to challenge the Trump agenda. Building on analysis of data collected from a random sample of participants from the Washington, DC, March for Science, which took place in April 2017, I explore how participants at the March for Science compare to a broader sample of participants in the Resistance. Although they have some unique characteristics, my findings show that there are few statistically significant differences between participants in the March for Science and others participating in the Resistance. I conclude this piece by discussing the implications of these findings on scientists in the Resistance and science activism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which revealed that intersectionality influences the constituencies represented in the Women's March on Washington in January 2017. Topics discussed include how social identities influenced participation in the Women's March and how these coalitions enable for understanding and predicting the future of opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump and his policies.

In this paper, I look at how subnational policies in the United States are interacting with policy making at the federal level to address the issue of global climate change. I focus on a coordinated attempt to get the national government to fund local efforts to address climate change. Although local climate initiatives in the US were successfully translated into a national policy to support these local efforts, their implementation through hybrid arrangements that are being formed between business and local governmental actors will potentially create additional challenges to federal policy making. I introduce the notion of boomerang federalism, which builds on the extant research on federalism and vertical policy integration, to explain the process through which local efforts mobilize initiatives at the national level that, in turn, provide support for the local initiatives themselves. Reviewing the implementation process of this effort, I discuss the ways that businesses are working alongside local governments to address climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we understand political polarization within the U.S. climate change debate? This article unpacks the different components of the debate to determine the source of the political divide that is so noted in the mainstream media and academic literatures. Through analysis of the content of congressional hearings on the issue of climate change, we are able to explain political polarization of the issue more fully. In particular, our results show that, contrary to representations in the mainstream media, there is increasing consensus over the science of the issue. Discussions of the type of policy instrument and the economic implications of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to polarize opinion. This article concludes by exploring how these findings help us understand more recent political events around climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is the relationship between social movements and electoral politics? Although the empirical reality of American politics has increasingly blurred the lines between activism and electoral politics, sociology has yet to explore these changes and provide theoretical and methodological tools to understand them. Focusing on the experience of young Americans, this review explores this relationship and outlines opportunities for future research. It is broken down into three sections. First, I review the main themes in the study of youth political participation in America. Second, using examples from the 2008 election, the article examines recent increases in youth participation. Third and finally, this article discusses the case of the Obama campaign, its transition into the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America, and aspects of the 2012 election to highlight the complex relationship between movements and electoral politics in America today. The paper concludes by highlighting opportunities for sociologists to bridge the connections between activism and electoral politics in new and meaningful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses aspects of the article "Disenfranchisement of Countries and Civil Society at COP-15 in Copenhagen," by Ian McGregor within the issue. The author offers two main criticisms of McGregor's report regarding the influence of developing countries and civil society participation at the COP-15 summit meeting negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, including restricted access and a lock out of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

What happened to non-governmental organizations' participation at the COP-15 round of climate negotiations in Copenhagen? Although the climate regime has been seen as relatively open to civil society, everything changed in Copenhagen and civil society became increasingly disenfranchised. This article discusses the three main forces that led to civil society's disenfranchisement at this round of the climate negotiations: increased registration, poor planning by the Danish organizers and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the merging of movements. I conclude by discussing implications of the increase in civil society disenfranchisement to the climate regime and to the study of global environmental politics more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does the Internet play in mobilizing participants in days of action? Although most research has focused on the way that computer-mediated communication is changing transnational collective action, it is unclear how social movement reliance on this new form of communication is modifying protest within nation-states. This paper analyses how participants in a national day of action in the United States were mobilized, focusing on the role that the Internet played. We find that a very high percentage of participants in all cities heard about the day of action through e-mail lists or websites. Those who mobilized through the Internet, however, were very different from those who mobilized through personal and organizational ties. In particular, the participants who heard about the event through all channels of mediated communication - including the Internet - were much more likely to come to the event alone than those who heard about it through their social networks. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of our findings to collective action and civic participation in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five globalization protests in three countries. By disaggregating protesters from the local area and protecters who traveled to the protest event, the role that organizations play becomes clear: SMOs mobilize non-local participants and coordinate travel to protest events. These data also suggest answers to the broader questions that have emerged about global civil society. In contrast to the expectations in recent scholarship, we find very few protesters came from outside of the countries in which the protests were taking place. Instead, we conclude that SMOs use the Internet to connect domestically grounded activists to transnational struggles and to mobilize them to participate in large-scale protest events. In other words, organizations do, indeed, matter in the globalization movement and have significantly expanded the protesting population beyond local citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing sociological analyses express differing expectations about state control over economic actors and the political feasibility of environmental regulation. Recent literature on the environmental state sees environmental protection as becoming a basic responsibility of postindustrial states, with economic actors no longer having the autonomy they once enjoyed. In contrast, much of the work in environmental sociology expects commitments to environmental state responsibilities to be largely symbolic. Scholars working from this perspective tend to see environmental damage as proportionate to economic prosperity. To assess the differing expectations, we analyze actual environmental performance among the most prosperous nation-states focusing on national-level emissions of carbon dioxide. The strongest predictors of emissions are found to be measures of ecological efficiency, which tend to be associated with potentially less symbolic policy decisions. For the future, there is a need to move beyond broad assertions, devoting greater attention to the conditions under which states are more or less likely to impose constraints on economic actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which civil society actors and developing countries are limited in their engagement in global governance for sustainable development. Beginning with the relevant literature about how these social actors face obstacles to full participation, we present the notion of what we call "disenfranchisement" to describe the condition of being marginalized within the global policy-making arena. We put forward a conceptual framework that outlines what we identify as the three dimensions of disenfranchisement. By disaggregating the notion of disenfranchisement into its constituent dimensions, we outline potential operationalizations of these dimensions. Through the dimensions, the framework explicitly describes the mechanics of disenfranchisement, outlining the reasons that these actors become disenfranchised. We conclude by presenting the ways in which this framework can be applied in future empirical research, which will be critical to understanding the challenges to meaningful inclusion of stakeholders in global governance for sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of ecological modernization has received growing attention over the past decade, but in the process, it has been interpreted in conflicting and sometimes contradictory ways. In this article, we attempt to bring greater clarity to the discussion. Reviewing the works both by the theory's best-known proponents and by its most outspoken critics, we note that difficulties are created not just by the combining of theoretical predictions and policy prescriptions - a point that has already been noted in the literature - but also by the stark and highly significant differences in expectations between ecological modernization and most prevailing theories of society-environment relationships. Perhaps in part because of these differences, disagreements have often been expressed in stark, black-and-white terms. If the problems are to be resolved, there will be a need for greater theoretical precision, developed in conjunction with empirical research that is more focused, more finely differentiated, and more rigorous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although rural residents often expect resource extraction to lead to local prosperity, much of the recent research finds that resource extraction is associated with poverty. This paper tests these results by examining whether the findings may be due to methodological factors such as the tendency to focus on extreme cases, particular extracting sectors, and certain periods of time. By comparing two localities that have followed very different developmental trajectories--the state of Wisconsin and Hokkaido Prefecture in Japan--during the period from 1970 to 1990, this paper addresses these issues. The results do not clearly support either the expectation that resource extraction will lead to poverty or that it will lead to economic prosperity. Instead, like a handful of studies on resource dependency, the results indicate that the relationship be-tween extraction and poverty is unique to location. Despite the many differences between the United States and Japan, the strongest correlates of poverty in each country involve the proportion of land in an area that is forested. Particularly because these results mirror the findings from the one previous study that included this variable, future research must give greater attention to this explicitly environmental variable, as well as examining some of the possible reasons for the relationship.

This paper adds to our understanding of how people's climate change concern and norms influence their leisure air travel. It does so by examining the roles of Norwegians' beliefs about climate change and emissions from air travel, their felt responsibility to limit emissions (personal norm), and expectations and behaviors of friends and family (social norms) in such travel. A representative sample of Norwegians was surveyed in 2019 and 2020 (N = 2842), based on a framework combining institutional and social-psychological perspectives. Structural equation modeling of the data reveals that leisure air travel is habituated and part of a lifestyle, supported by social norms, self-enhancement values and urban residency. Personal norms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from flying are beginning to emerge in Norway, but their effect on leisure air travel is small and only indirect. Our findings suggest the need for interventions to complement and potentially amplify the emerging moralization process and support an evolution of new habits and travel lifestyle to limit the emissions from leisure air travel substantially. The disruption of travel habits by the COVID-19 pandemic might ease such a process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recent studies have suggested that environmental participation may be a countertrend to decreasing civic engagement in the United States, there are very few empirical studies that examine these claims. This paper studies participation in local environmental stewardship as such a countertrend. Using data collected from participants in the Watershed Stewards Academies (WSAs) of Maryland, we assess how these organisations are successful in mobilising individuals to be environmentally and civically engaged in their communities. We argue that hybrid organisations like the WSAs represent a countertrend to diminishing rates of civic engagement by offering citizens what a “paper-membership” cannot: the chance to lead their own environmental restoration projects, create tangible change in their communities, and network with other like-minded individuals. These environmental programmes serve to diversify democracy at the local level, providing a unique form of civic engagement and enriching the connections between individual citizens and their civic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explaining collaboration between actors involved in policy processes is crucial for understanding these processes and their outcomes. The policy science literature has advanced several hypotheses explicating what enables or hinders collaboration. However, only a handful of studies compare these factors across different policy contexts. This paper investigates the role of beliefs and influence in shaping collaboration under conditions of high and low conflict by estimating Exponential Random Graph Models using network survey data on the climate policy domains in four countries. Results show that both beliefs and influence are associated with the formation of collaboration ties in the high conflict contexts of South Korea and the United States, whereas neither are significant in the low conflict contexts of Sweden and Switzerland. By considering the level of conflict, our findings provide a more nuanced understanding of when beliefs and influence shape collaboration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although substantial attention has focused on efforts by the new Administration to block environmental policies, climate politics have been contentious in the US since well before the election of Donald Trump. In this paper, we extend previous work on empirical examinations of echo chambers in US climate politics using new data collected on the federal climate policy network in summer 2016. We test for the similarity and differences at two points in time in homophily and echo chambers using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to compare new findings from 2016 to previous work on data from 2010. We show that echo chambers continue to play a significant role in the network of information exchange among policy elites working on the issue of climate change. In contrast to previous findings where echo chambers centered on a binding international commitment to emission reductions, we find that the pre-existing echo chambers have almost completely disappeared and new structures have formed around one of the main components of the Obama Administration’s national climate policy: the Clean Power Plan. These results provide empirical evidence that science communication and policymaking at the elite level shift in relation to the policy instruments under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]