Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 207

It goes without saying that these developments go together with
internal debates within the environmental movement on strategies and
goals between radical and reformist factions, and to some extent also
between northern (or Western) large and well-resourced environmen-
tal organizations and smaller NGOs from the South (or northern ones
identifying themselves with those from the South). Especially around
the symbolic flagships of global capitalism the minds and strategies of
NGOs split, for example, on environmental NGO cooperation with
the IMF, Shell, McDonald's or the World Bank. How can environmen-
tal NGOs in the Netherlands cooperate with Shell on solar power,
when Shell causes so much trouble for the Ogoni in Nigeria? How can
international NGOs cooperate in developing environmental condition-
alities for World Bank loans, when many of the World Bank projects
have disastrous consequences on localities and for indigenous people
in developing countries? It is these kinds of dilemmas that a global
civil society is facing. Although the powerful institutional actors in the
space of flows have often major incentives for allowing environmental
NGOs in their global networks, resistance against such inclusion will
remain among the more radical grassroots factions of the environmen-
tal movement. In that sense, the environmental movement is no longer
just a place-based resistance movement against the global networks
that make up the space of flows, as Castells ( 1997a ) suggested. Nor
are environmental NGOs completely part of the space of flows. Increas-
ingly, environmental NGOs have become one of the mediating corri-
dors where the space of place logics connects with the space of flows.
5. Legitimatory capital at risk
The global environmental movement is the originator, the advocate
and the final judge of global environmental norms and values. From
the birth of the modern environmental movement onwards, the envi-
ronmental spokespersons of civil society have disclosed and judged on
environmental norm violations, either the legally set norms or those
prevailing in civil society. The production, distribution and strategic
use of information have always been the key power resource in this
process. But that has only been effective through the movement's legit-
imatory capital. It is, as Ulrich Beck ( 2004 : 239) rightly remarks, the
linkage of information with legitimation that has provided the envi-
ronmental movement with the ability to become a powerful actor in