Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 208

informational governance, even in those days when informational gov-
ernance was still underdeveloped. With the growing centrality of infor-
mation, informational processes and informational resources in envi-
ronmental politics and governance the (trans)national environmental
movement witnesses an improvement of their power position vis- a-vis
their main counterparts in the political and economic sectors. But that
continues only as long as their legitimatory capital is not put at risk.
Legitimatory capital is nonconvertible with economic or cultural
capital; legitimation cannot be bought, nor can it be transferred easily
from cultural capital (and, hence, it is different from the forms of capital
originally defined by Bourdieu). As much as the other forms of capi-
tal, legitimatory capital is not an absolute quantity but, rather, a rela-
tion, defined between different groups. It is the fragility of legitimation
of global corporate power, especially in the field of the environment,
which provides the environmental movement with significant legitima-
tory capital. But legitimatory capital does not just fall on an actor, it is
not pregiven, and therefore it needs to be actively maintained. Legitima-
tion is gained through long-term accumulated experiences of credible
behaviour; continuous release of reliable information; and measured
against accepted standards, norms and values of civil society. Steady
high levels of legitimatory capital of environmental movements, espe-
cially when compared to public authorities and economic actors, have
been illustrated by European survey research over the past one and a
half decades (Table 8.2 ).
Through their alliances with other actors and sectors, and through
their strategic use and disclosure of information in environmental
politics, legitimatory capital of environmental NGOs can be at risk.
When information is used to dramatise events and practices in order
to achieve certain goals, and when coalitions are built that are consid-
ered only of strategic, short-term and particular gains without taking
the partner's overall performance into account, then environmental
NGOs might be considered just to be one out of many parties with
their own specific interests, rather than a movement looking after and
safeguarding universal norms and values. This was exactly the case
in Greenpeace's misleading interpretation of the contents of Shell's oil
platform Brent Spar in 1995.
The multiple sources of information the reliability of information
and the lack of an authority to shift true from misleading information
also may interfere with legitimatory capital of NGOs. As the environ-
mental movement - more than most other social movements - draws