(Non)Environmental Alternative Action Organizations under the Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis: A Comparative European Perspective

Hard economic times have been considered obstacles for environmental activism by many environmental scholars, yet works, mostly based on case studies, on alternative action organizations (AAOs) during times of increasing livelihood vulnerability show considerable environmental activism. We explain this inconsistency by arguing that AAOs mobilizing at times of crisis opt for direct action, using strategies of citizens’ solidarity initiatives centering on meeting basic needs and sustainability goals and thereby carry on the environmental claim-making in a new way. To this end, we compare environmental AAOs (EAAOs) with non-environmental ones using a cross-national dataset of 4157 hubs-retrieved AAOs active during the economic crisis (2007–2016), in France, Greece, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. Given that EAAOs constitute more than one-third of all AAOs, it is clear that environmental protection or sustainable development are not neglected even at times of economic hardships. Instead, the crisis provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of action for existing organizations that can adopt sustainability activities focusing on alternative practices and lifestyles, improving societal resilience. We further show that EAAOs tend to be informal and, to an extent, more concentrated on contention and protests than non-environmental organizations.