Global Environmentalism and Local Politics: Transnational Advocacy Networks in Brazil, Ecuador, and India

Extract

Global Environmentalism and Local Politics: Transnational Advocacy Networks in Brazil, Ecuador, and India. By Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 195p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book brings a new angle to the study of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) by making local choices, priorities, and outcomes the central focus of its analysis. TANs link actors at local, national, and international levels in campaigns across national boundaries. As Maria Guadalupe Moag Rodrigues points out, most such studies have focused on the campaigns' impacts on governmental policies or on public opinion. Her focus is on a network's influence on a part of itself instead. Are local participants empowered by TANs to formulate their own autonomous conceptions of sustainable development and to gain institutionalized mechanisms to articulate those? To answer these questions, a focus on the internal dynamics of politics, resources, cohesion, and legitimacy in the network becomes central. This is not a wholly new approach and is actually quite common in other fields, but does represent a departure from many studies of similar phenomena in political science. Rodrigues argues that it is especially important to look at the impact on local network members because that is central for local outcomes.