Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 210

Especially in an Information Age, the countervailing powers chal-
lenging the environmental movement will point their arrows primarily
at the legitimatory capital of environmental NGOs. In their informa-
tional and conventional struggles on the environment, questioning the
reliability, truthfulness and credibility - or, to be short, the legitimacy -
of environmental NGOs is one of the most frequent strategies followed
by companies and authorities who challenge environmental NGOs,
that is, when more classical resources, such as limiting press freedom
and restricting the freedom of establishing NGOs, are no longer possi-
ble (see Chapter 10 ). As much as in the Information Age reputational
capital becomes the Achilles' heel of the transnational companies, it is
the same with legitimatory capital for the environmental movement.
6. Conclusion
The Internet and ICT-mediated communications have made a sig-
nificant difference in the operations and structure of a global civil
society, which aims to defend environmental sustainability. To some
extent, parallels in innovation can be drawn with what happened in
the global networked economy, where environmental challenges were
addressed via new organizational schemes, new (marketing) techniques
and strategies and new forms of legitimation.
The virtual space of the Internet has become a crucial constitutive
component of a local green community, through the constant multici-
plicity of e-mail bonds. This happens in addition to a more dispersed
green social network, stretching beyond the local. Today, there is a
more complex interweaving of activists' virtual and corporeal social-
ities and geographies (Dodge and Kitchen, 2001 ; Miller and Slater,
2000 ). Although this all clearly tends to strengthen the activists' green
identities, at the same time it transforms the conventional place-based
local green identities to more global ones. This means that the Internet
and ICT cannot be ignored in understanding today's environmentalism,
both as a reinforcement and constitutive power of local green commu-
nities, and as a formative power of building green networks beyond the
local and the national. Although the Internet and ICT might not have
a major transformative impact on the internal organisation and func-
tioning of local green communities, it has been a key factor in changing
the opportunities, strategies, organisational modes and countervailing
powers of the green civil society.