In environmental politics, social movements play a crucial role, promoting participatory rights and confronting injustice, inequality, and the interests of the powerful. This article examines an underexplored topic in the literature on social movements, especially in Latin America: the use of litigation to force decisionmakers to comply with participatory formats, specifically in the course of opposition to hydroelectric dams. These projects often are destructive to the local environment and communities. This study examines four cases of environmental litigation that halted dam construction in Brazil and Chile, singling out causal pathways for successful collective action. It focuses on two dimensions of movement success: the implementation of participatory formats and the resulting cancellation of dam projects. In line with the joint effect model of social movement theory, the cross-case comparison of legal disputes shows that pursuing legal strategies in parallel to broad social mobilization and the support of institutional allies, can lead to successful outcomes.

Legislative allies are widely recognized as key to social movement success, but the emergence of their alliance with activists remains understudied. This article proposes a strategic approach to this phenomenon based on the cases of the environmental, labor, and LGBT+ movements in Chile and their allied legislators. According to this approach, an alliance emerges due to two necessary conditions. Movement organizations must display tactical capacity, which signals their adaptability and competence to participate in Congress. And a socially skilled leadership creates the trust required for movement leaders and legislators to cooperate during the lawmaking process. This approach emphasizes that alliances emerge from activists’ strategic efforts to build a social tie, whose effectiveness is mediated by legislators’ expectations and congressional norms. By specifying the strategic dimension of an alliance, this study highlights the capacity of activists to foster cooperative relations with state actors.

This paper focuses on the ways in which past racial contention shapes possibilities for contemporary civic action focused on youth education. Drawing on the recently legislated Civil Rights/Human Rights Education curriculum in Mississippi—a state with an exceptionally charged history of racial contention—we identify barriers to curricular implementation in Mississippi public schools and draw on case studies of initiatives in two communities that have successfully overcome these barriers. Results emphasize how the legacies of civil rights era struggles interact with contemporary demographic and educational dynamics to enable two distinct forms of robust civic action. School-centered civic practice is enabled by communities characterized by strong civil rights organizing infrastructures, high levels of contention with White authorities throughout the civil rights era, and low participation in public schools by White families. Conversely, youth civic practice in communities marked by high levels of civil rights-era contention but significant contemporary White participation in public schools occurs through out-of-school initiatives. In both cases, however, participation in and exposure to civil rights and human rights education has occurred in racially-bifurcated ways that reflect the state’s legacy of institutionalized racism.