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Environmental Activism in Ukraine: Everyday Concerns as Reasons for Civic Mobilization 1

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... The high salience of local, placebased problems that people experience repeatedly in their daily lives facilitates mobilization. One study of recent environmental activism in Ukraine, for example, found that individuals' activism started as a response to accruing problems, such as living next to and experiencing daily polluted areas and rivers (Pietrzyk-Reeves et al., 2022). ...
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This chapter explores an increasingly common form of activism driven by the engagement of ordinary citizens in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which is called everyday activism. It does so by looking at the case of everyday environmentalism, which is tied to locally experienced environmental problems. The stories of an activist from Bosnia-Herzegovina fighting for clean air and one from Russia seeking to build sustainable rural communities provide examples at different ends of the spectrum of everyday activism in terms of how they engage average citizens; the issue of concern; their level of organizational structure; and their interaction with domestic and international networks, donors, and political authorities. These activists reveal shared commitments but different strategies for addressing opportunities and obstacles to achieving their goals.
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This article examines Russian citizens’ support for and participation in civic activism today, nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, we consider how activism has evolved over time in two key issue sectors—environmentalism and women’s rights. We draw on a recent nationally representative survey that challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or fearful of participating in civic activism, showing, to the contrary, that Russians are willing and interested in engaging in public activities. Data from field interviews with environmental and feminist activists, along with the authors’ past twenty-five years of research in these areas of Russian civic activism, allow us to identify an ongoing shift from professionalization and formalization of NGOs in the 1990s and early 2000s, to informal organizing, often assisted by social media platforms, today. We argue that the three major social and political drivers of this change in Russian civic activism are the contraction of political freedoms, the decline in foreign funding, and the availability of web-based communication and fundraising technologies.
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Although research on smart cities increasingly acknowledges the involvement of civil society actors, most studies fall short when it comes to clarifying the specific modalities of civil society involvement. By probing into the smart city ecology that has developed around the Amsterdam Smart City-Foundation, we explore not only the extent to which the civil society is part of a smart city ecology but also what role civil society actors hold within this ecology. This article draws on data gathered and analyzed through quantitative and qualitative methods. The qualitative analysis focuses on analyzing the institutional dynamics that shape civil society involvement in Amsterdam’s smart city ecology. The quantitative data are used to unravel the relational dynamics by quantifying collaborative patterns between different types of organizations in Amsterdam’s smart city ecology. Our findings reveal that powerful institutional dynamics, manifested through normative pressures, favor the involvement of socially oriented civil society actors. At the same time, however, relational dynamics that shape the collaborative patterns in the projects of the ecology rather exclude the socially oriented civil society at the benefit of an economically oriented civil society. In other words, while the entire ecology rhetorically adheres to an ethos of pervasive civil society involvement, politically, socially, and civically oriented civil society actors lack inter-organizational collaboration—even in the supposedly inclusive context of Amsterdam.
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The European Union’s (EU) Green Deal gives increased attention to the sustainability of international product cycles by implementing ‘due diligence’ requirements. We examine the difficulties in the implementation of the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR) in two countries with weak management capacities such as Romania and Ukraine. We find that domestic and transnational civil society actors can support the implementation of due diligence requirements mainly by challenging the dominant position of private and state actors engaged in cutting deals with the EU-based wood industry, as well as contributing to increasing politicisation, raising awareness and public mobilisation.
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Scholars have used varying terminology for describing non-state entities seeking to influence public policy or work with the EU’s institutions. This paper argues that the use of this terminology is not and should not be random, as different ‘frames’ come with different normative visions about the role(s) of these entities in EU democracy. A novel bibliometric analysis of 780 academic publications between 1992 and 2020 reveals that three frames stand out: The interest group frame, the NGO frame, as well as the civil society organisation frame; a number of publications also use multiple frames. This article reveals the specific democratic visions contained in these frames, including a pluralist view for interest groups; a governance view for NGOs as ‘third sector’ organisations, and participatory and deliberative democracy contributions for civil society organisations. The use of these frames has dynamically changed over time, with ‘interest groups’ on the rise. The results demonstrate the shifting focus of studies on non-state actors in the EU and consolidation within the sub-field; the original visions of European policy-makers emerging from the 2001 White Paper on governance may only partially come true.
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While political environmentalism played an important role in social mobilization against communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservationism appeared to be in decline across the region, and external pressure from European institutions and Western donors influenced environmental policy. What explains the effectiveness of protest since the environmental movement emerged in the 1980s? We trace the emergence and evolution of Polish political environmentalism, looking at three levels of the environmental movement’s legitimacy: the level of practices, societal support, and discourse. Each phase identified between 1980s and 2017 saw shifts on different levels of legitimacy, and each ended with a spectacular environmental protest or a decision, bearing implications for the following phase. Since 2010, we see a deep polarization of Polish politics, limiting the effectiveness of environmental protest despite the movement’s regained triple legitimacy in large parts of the society.
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What can we learn about civil society in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia from studies on activism within the region’s urban spaces? In this article, we argue that studying urban activism in CEE offers useful insights for general theory building about the importance of uneventful protests, the formation of agency and the processes of becoming active in the public sphere (conceptualized here as “political becoming”), and the enabling role of informality in collective action in adverse contexts. By contributing to our understanding in this way, these insights help to advance relational and process-based conceptions of civil society.
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The idea of this Special Issue appeared in early 2014, when the heat of the fire on Kyiv’s Independence Square had not fully cooled down and when many civic activists and newborn volunteers had turned their ceaseless energy to yet another fire first in Crimea and then in Eastern Ukraine. The events that seemingly put the state of Ukraine on the brink of its very existence were evolving too fast, but civil society’s response to them was no less prompt and adaptive. Volunteers and activists were trying on new roles each day as they were helping those escaping persecution, repression and hostilities, equipping and maintaining those who fought with weapons or joining their ranks, developing reform agenda and drafting legislative proposals. What seemed astounding back then, and still does today, was how those thousands of volunteers and millions of “ordinary citizens” who mobilized to support new civic initiatives took over the functions of the weak and nearly collapsed state eroded by corruption, nepotism, the neglect of its citizens and of the country’s national interests. Challenging a post-Soviet monster disguised behind the mask of electoral democracy and market economy, citizens were bringing in a new social contract based on trust and solidarity on which a new state could be built. The speed of events and the scale of civil society engagement precluded any long-term comprehensive analysis, yet researchers’ zeal to reflect upon what looked as a tectonic move in Ukraine’s political and social development took over. At first, our idea was to co-author an article examining civil society’s role in a post-Euromaidan Ukraine, but soon enough the task became too big. The initial idea thus evolved into producing an edited volume with different authors looking into their respective fields of civil society in Ukraine in order to grasp at least a small portion of change. We are grateful to many researchers in Ukraine and abroad who responded to our call for papers in May 2016 and who contributed their ideas to this Special Issue. Some of these ideas eventually turned into articles and we would like to give special thanks to those colleagues who bore with us through rounds of revisions till the very end of this journey. Their articles made this Special Issue happen. We are also grateful to the Kyiv-Mohyla Law and Politics Journal for hosting this Special Issue and for supporting our initiative from the early stages through review and editing to the publication process. We would like to thank UACES – the Academic Association for Contemporary European Studies, UESA – the Ukrainian European Studies Association and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in European Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for their financial and logistical support in organizing the Final Conference of this project, which took place at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on November 21, 2017, the fourth anniversary of the Euromaidan. We are also enormously grateful to all the participants of the Conference for their remarks, comments and questions. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to the Kyiv office of Baker McKenzie, which has provided financial support to the publication of this Issue.
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Activism is typically associated with work within charities/NGOs or participation in social movements. This essay highlights activism different from these forms in that it happens without funding or mass mobilisation. Instead, it is powered by the longer-term perspective and day-to-day efforts of ‘activist citizens’. Based on interviews and participant observation in bookshop-cafés and other donor-independent initiatives in Novi Sad, Serbia, the essay argues that such ‘everyday activism’ is significant not only because it supports the development of other, more visible, forms of activism, but also in its own right, as a counter-space contributing to social change. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now recognised as key third sector actors on the landscapes of development, human rights, humanitarian action, environment, and many other areas of public action, from the post-2004 tsunami reconstruction efforts in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, to the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign for aid and trade reform and developing country debt cancellation. As these two examples illustrate, NGOs are best-known for two different, but often interrelated, types of activity – the delivery of services to people in need, and the organization of policy advocacy, and public campaigns in pursuit of social transformation. NGOs are also active in a wide range of other specialized roles such as democracy building, conflict resolution, human rights work, cultural preservation, environmental activism, policy analysis, research, and information provision. This chapter mainly confines itself to a discussion of NGOs in the international development context, but much of its argument also applies to NGOs more widely.
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This study explores the determinants of the low level of civic engagement in Ukraine. Applying the methodological framework of analytical sociology, we consider different social mechanisms that explain the weakness of the Ukrainian third sector. First, we discuss how the political system and economic performance of the country have shaped beliefs, values, and motives of people by creating the context for their actions. Second, we focus on different aspects of people’s experiences during the Soviet times to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning unwillingness of citizens to join CSOs. Analyzing the survey data of the years 2010 (beginning of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency) and 2014 (survey conducted right after the ‘‘Euromaidan’’), we argue that some specific features of Homo Sovieticus, such as passivity, absence of political identification, and reliance on informal networks negatively affect the propensity of people to participate in CSOs. These effects are complemented by disappointment with the post-Soviet transformation and low subjective social status. Based on the results of analyses, we formulate suggestions concerning possible ways of fostering the development of civil society in Ukraine.
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The ecological network of Natura 2000, an European Union (EU) initiative to halt biodiversity loss across Europe, has dominated biodiversity governance in the new EU member states in recent years, as implementation was a condition of accession. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have generally assisted Natura 2000 implementation. In two Central and Eastern European countries (Poland and Hungary), NGOs became involved in different ways; this paper seeks to analyse and explain these national differences by researching the theoretical background of policy networks and advocacy coalitions in both countries. In Hungary, NGOs worked closely with governmental authorities and contributed significantly to site selection. In Poland, NGOs initially opposed government plans, but later moved toward close cooperation with public institutions; this resulted in a significant expansion in the area and number of designated Natura 2000 sites. In both countries, NGO influence increased during the Natura 2000 process owing to the establishment of multi-level policy networks with the European Commission and public institutions, based on resource dependencies and shared beliefs. In post-socialist countries, the progression from government-monopolized biodiversity conservation implies a growing importance and contribution of NGOs, and their ability to use resources appropriately in the new governance contexts.
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Shows how social change affects political mobilization indirectly through the restructuring of existing power relations, comparing the impact of the ecology, gay rights, peace, and women's movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Of interest to students and researchers in political science and sociology.
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Journal of Democracy 7.3 (1996) 38-52 The "civil society argument," as Michael Walzer calls it, is actually a complex set of arguments, not all of which are congruent. In the rough pastiche that has become the commonly accepted version, a "dense network of civil associations" is said to promote the stability and effectiveness of the democratic polity through both the effects of association on citizens' "habits of the heart" and the ability of associations to mobilize citizens on behalf of public causes. Emergent civil societies in Latin America and Eastern Europe are credited with effective resistance to authoritarian regimes, democratizing society from below while pressuring authoritarians for change. Thus civil society, understood as the realm of private voluntary association, from neighborhood committees to interest groups to philanthropic enterprises of all sorts, has come to be seen as an essential ingredient in both democratization and the health of established democracies. Thus summarized, the argument leaves many questions unanswered. Some of these are definitional, arising from the different ways in which civil society has been applied in various times and places. Does it, for instance, include business ("the market") as well as voluntary organizations, or does the market constitute a separate, "private" sphere? If we exclude the market, should we nevertheless include economic associations -- trade groups, professional organizations, labor unions, and the like? What about political organizations? Does it make sense, following Antonio Gramsci, to distinguish "civil" from "political" society? If so, how are we to distinguish between political associations per se and the political activities of groups in civil society, from interest groups to religious bodies, which are intermittently mobilized in pursuit of political goals? Just when does the "civil" become the "political"? Beyond such definitional concerns, there is also the elusive character of the relationship between "civil society" and democratic governance. Just how is it that associations formed among individuals produce the large-scale political and social benefits postulated by the civil society argument? Is the cultivation of "habits of the heart" that encourage tolerance, cooperation, and civic engagement the key? If so, under which circumstances and forms of small-scale interaction are these effects likely to appear? If, as some hold, civil society's chief virtue is its ability to act as an organized counterweight to the state, to what extent can this happen without the help of political parties and expressly political movements? Finally, what prevents civil society from splitting into warring factions (a possibility that theorists since Hegel have worried about) or degenerating into a congeries of rent-seeking "special interests"? What is it about civil society, in other words, that produces the benevolent effects posited by the civil society argument? In attempting to answer these questions, it might be useful to make a rough distinction between two broad versions of the "civil society argument." The first version is crystallized in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, with important antecedents in the work of the eighteenth-century "Scottish moralists," including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson. This approach puts special emphasis on the ability of associational life in general and the habits of association in particular to foster patterns of civility in the actions of citizens in a democratic polity. We shall call this family of arguments "Civil Society I." The second version, articulated most forcefully by Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik, and their associates in formulating a strategy for resistance to Poland's communist regime in the 1980s, is also evident in recent literature on processes of "redemocratization" in Latin America. This argument, which we call "Civil Society II," lays special emphasis on civil society as a sphere of action that is independent of the state and that is capable -- precisely for this reason -- of energizing resistance to a tyrannical regime. It might already be apparent that there is a degree of contradiction between "Civil Society I" and "Civil Society II," for while the former postulates the positive effects of association for governance (albeit democratic governance), the latter emphasizes the importance of civil association as a counterweight to the state. There is no reason in principle why the "counterweight" of civil society should not become a burden to a democratic as well as...
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Qualitative studies featuring in-depth research have recently pushed back against characterizations of citizens in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as passive. After mobilizations in 2014, how do citizens in BiH engage in public action, and what factors explain their public participation? This article uses data from an original, nationally representative survey to depict civic engagement and investigate the proposition that citizens engage in civic action when these efforts address their primary concerns—everyday social problems, rather than abstract political ideals. In addition, this article draws on interviews to probe whether civic activists incorporate citizens’ priority concerns in developing strategies for increasing public participation in their work. It finds that most citizens cite their motivation for civic action as tackling concrete everyday problems and helping those in need. Statistical analysis indicates that while the segment of the population that supports civic engagement on conservative values is small, this portion is more likely than the larger portion supporting civic engagement on intractable socio-economic problems to take action. Interviews with civic activists point not only to their efforts to engage citizens by acknowledging their concerns but also to challenges in connecting with citizens. This systematic investigation depicts the nuances of and contradictions in citizen participation in BiH. Citizens engage at modest levels and are often motivated by the norm of helping those vulnerable and addressing everyday problems. However, the small segment of the population concerned about conservative values is more effectively mobilized than a large segment prioritizing socio-economic concerns.
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The authors compare civil society development in Russia and Ukraine in recent years in terms of civil society's structure and relationships with the state and the broader society. They find major differences in 1) the treatment of civil society by state actors and 2) the level of trust placed in civil society by the population. They use these and other findings to assess civil society's ability to play economic, political and social roles as defined by Michael Edwards in Civil Society () and discover important differences emerging with regard to the political and social roles.
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Despite decades of Western assistance seeking to develop civil societies in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, many local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) lack strong bases in their societies. This field-based study of citizens’ views of Western-aided women’s organisations in four Serbian towns uses frame resonance to explore why. In interviews, many citizens felt that NGOs worked on issues that are abstract, unimportant, narrowly focused, and/or imported, even imposed. Serbian NGOs could increase ties to the public by pursuing activities that better resonate with local norms and priorities, as well as by framing and demonstrating their work as locally responsive.
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Decentralization was crucial pillar of larger political and economic transformation in the post-socialistic context in Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Last decades of change within political and economic system in Poland provide numerous examples of various dimensions of reforms. This chapter refers to decentralization seen as process in reaction against the failure of the centralized state. The scope of two decentralizations waves is described followed by analysis of current subnational government system including public finance and development of civil service. This chapter discusses also main challenges within the local communities like citizens’ participation and low level of trust in Polish society.
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During the last 15 years, environmental movements in many western countries have developed into highly institutionalised mass membership organisations (Conservation associations, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund). The degree of institutionalisation, however, differs from country to country and is largely determined by the political opportunity structure of a country. In this article, the different dimensions of political opportunity structure and institutionalisation are dealt with, and a number of hypotheses about the relations between these dimensions are developed and tested. A comparison of four countries reveals the differences between, on the one hand, the highly institutionalised environmental movements of Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and, on the other hand, the scarcely institutionalised French movement. Nevertheless, important differences can be found in the specific features of institutionalisation in the first three countries; these appear to be caused mainly by the differences in political opportunity structures.
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This research tests the hypothesis that social identities play a key role in the success or failure of democracy, as individuals often hold ethnic and regional identities in a mutually exclusive fashion, resisting calls to act politically on other identities that cut across them. Activists in environmental non-governmental organisations were interviewed in Latvia, Poland and Ukraine in order to examine the policy process in an area that cuts across regional and ethnic lines. The results support the argument that ethnic and regional divisions harm cooperation on environmental issues, though other hypotheses cannot be ruled out.
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This issue of American Behavioral Scientist is the second in a two-part series on civil society and the social capital debate. Although the first issue (Edwards & Foley, 1997) focused on the social capital debate in the United States, the present issue takes a decidedly comparative approach, with a primary focus on civil society and the character and significance of associational life for contemporary societies. In this article, we sketch the history of the notion of civil society, particularly as that term has become current in contemporary debates. The article also discusses how the notion of social capital became entangled with that of civil society and summarizes the debate surrounding social capital. Although the neo-Tocquevillean version of the civil society argument is probably most familiar to American readers-thanks in part to Robert Putnam's promotion of the notion of the decline of social capital in recent U.S. experience-we attempt to show here some of the diversity of conceptions that characterize the revival of the civil society argument in hopes of moving the debate decisively "beyond Tocqueville." In the final section of this article, we introduce the articles that follow in this context. In the concluding article, we attempt to assess what we have learned about civil society and social capital, drawing a distinction between the polemical and heuristic uses of these notions and their function as referents for empirical inquiry in which latter respect we find both concepts decidedly wanting.
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Incl. abstract, bib. This paper addresses the question of whether trust in civil society groups is justified when it comes to giving voice to the poor. It addresses the issue of accountability as it relates to civil society, defining "moral' accountability as an organization's accountability towards the people it was established to help, and procedural accountability as internal management. It draws a distinction between civil society and non-governmental organizations, and argues that the contradiction between "moral' and "procedural' accountability applies primarily to non-governmental organizations, a subset of civil society. Beginning with an overview of the concept of civil society and the relevance of voice, it develops a typology of civil society actors to clarify different forms of accountability, and concludes with policy recommendations.
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Environmentalism in Central and Southeastern Europe: Historical Perspectives
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  • I Žebec Šilj
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