| This dissertation engages the organizing challenges of transnational social movement networks by examining the global climate justice movement (GCJM) mobilized around the UNFCCC negotiations from 2007 through 2010. This project primarily investigates the organizing strategies and dynamics of transnational environmental movement networks seeking to influence the climate change treaty negotiations. First, the analysis investigates the field-level dynamics of social movement networks and their evolution by elaborating on the current and historical political arrangements and power dynamics associated with their relationships to each other as well as the UNFCCC. The focus is placed on three networks in this analysis: Climate Action Network (CAN), Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), and Climate Justice Action (CJA). Then the focus is turned to why groups from developing countries, such as peasant farmers, indigenous groups, and environmental justice organizations, coalesced around Climate Justice Now! and made it a forceful network within the negotiations and on the streets. Field research methods are employed to understand why CJN!, throughout its evolution as a transnational network, used various organizing strategies in response to organizational and political challenges to build trust and solidarity among grassroots groups from the "Global South." The project also investigates how certain organizing strategies are related to different organizing dynamics and outcomes over time; in developmental stages or what I term organizing cascades. Findings indicate that Climate Justice Now! was active in facilitating organizing cascades to manage shifts in the UNFCCC political context as well as threats internal to the network to discursive consensus, legitimacy, and resourcing. Organizing cascades are clusters of organizing activities such as organizational decisions, discursive processes, and resourcing strategies that networks strategically facilitate in order to manage organizing challenges. Additionally, organizing cascades are cumulative. In other words, once a network is established decisions and dynamics at one point in time during its development are culmination of decisions and dynamics before that time. An organizing cascade may, on the one hand, confine organizational networks in that they can constrain future activities and opportunities, but on the other hand, decisions made in one cascade may present networks with unexpected organizing and discursive prospects in the future. |
