Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 58

the birth period of environmental sociology and political sciences,
some did see and analyse the environmental state as of critical impor-
tance for environmental reform, for instance, from a tragedy of the
commons/free-rider perspective, a more applied policy science analy-
sis, or a Weberian rationalisation view. Much research was normative
and design-oriented, focusing on the contribution to and development
of new state-oriented institutional layouts for environmental policy
and reform. Environmental Impact Assessment schemes, environmen-
tal integration models, policy instruments, control and enforcement
arrangements and the like were typical subjects for agenda-setting and
implementation research.
Environmental nongovernmental organisations and civil society
protests formed a second object of early environmental social science
research on environmental reform. Investigations into local community
protests on environmental pollution and studies on local and national
environmental nongovernmental organisations constituted the core of
this second branch of environmental reform analyses in the 1970s and
early 1980s. The resource mobilisation studies in the United States
(cf. Zald and McCarthy, 1979 ; McCarthy and Zald, 1977a ; 1977b ;
1980 ) and the new social movement approach in Europe (cf. Offe,
1985 ; Klandermans, 1986 ) were two dominant perspectives among a
wide range of studies that tried to understand the importance of civil
society in bringing about social transformations in the core institu-
tions of modern society. In addition to a clear emphasis on the protests
against what were seen as the fundamental roots of the environmental
crises (Pepper, 1984 ), many studies also focused on the contribution
of the emerging environmental movement to the actual and necessary
reforms of the modern institutional order, be it via escapism in small
communities detached from the dominant economic (and often also
political) institutions (cf. the small is beautiful postindustrial utopians;
Frankel, 1987 ); via public campaigning against polluters; via lobby-
ing and influencing political processes; or via awareness raising and
attitudinal changes of citizens and consumers. Among environmental
sociologists there was often a significant degree of sympathy with, and
even involvement in, these new social movements. Many of the more
radical and structuralist analyses of the 'roots of the environmental
crises' saw - and still see - the environmental movement as the last
resort for bringing about change and reform.