REACH: EU Chemicals Policy- Actors, Networks, Parties and Political Opportunities

Openings in political opportunity structures determine policy outcomes. A movement's success depends on their effective mobilizing strategies geared towards exploiting windows of opportunity. The methods included qualitative research of several primary sources including government documents, organization reports, corporate media information, policy documents, position papers, the scholarly literature, and key informant interviews. The results show that the European environmental movement effectively used several favorable strategies to enact a law to regulate chemicals called Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, of Chemicals (REACH) founded upon the precautionary principle and reversal of the burden of proof onto industry. "Pioneer" green states used the Europeanization process in concert with configurations of political elites to access cleavages. Environmental movement activists and science experts accessed a pluralist Commission to influence political decision makers. A proREACH advocacy coalition served as an effective organizational mechanism for coordinating multifaceted lobbying, public information and media campaigns. Environmental epistemic communities played crucial roles in transferring technical information into regulatory language supporting a precautionary approach. Identifying favorable elements in the political opportunity structure and predicting movement success defends the value of the political opportunity model for predicting the effectiveness of social movement strategies. Social movements can choose between party movement and interest group tactics within the European Union institutional structure to challenge existing policies. Future collective actions can learn from the data when organizing their contentious actions within and around the European Union.