New Models for Struggle: Environmental Decision Making Through Consensus

Recent research in environmental sociology indicates that environmental movement activists continue to engage in radical, disruptive, and adversarial tactics to achieve their goals. In this paper I propose that environmentalists are using a new form of protest, specifically consensus-based decision-making. This new form emerged in response to profound changes in the political economy and ecology that have taken place during the last three decades. Consensus-based environmental decision-making is one method these actors are employing to find ways to achieve cleaner ecosystems and socioeconomic stability. Although consensus-building among actors of vastly unequal resources would appear to challenge traditional adversarial models of decision-making, I argue that it does not. Based on an analysis of interviews with environmentalists experienced in consensus-building, I conclude that activists in fact maintain an adversarial ideological stance toward industry and state actors and they subsume this stance under a more cooperative, 'consensus' framework. This is a form of 'infrapolitics'Ña covertly subversive act undertaken by subjugated groups in the presence of more powerful actors.