Can the goals of the environmentalists be advanced by active participation in election campaigns? To what extent should environmentalist strategies be based on building and relying on support from the labour movement? These and other similar questions are answered implicitly in the actual course of campaigns by environmental and other social movements, but are much less frequently addressed openly and critically. In addressing these questions Brian Martin looks at the strategies of two important Australian environmental movements: the anti-uranium movement and the movement against the flooding of the Franklin River in southest Tasmania.

A large fraction of the effort of most environmentalists is spent in ad hoc lobbying, publicity, community education and protesting. Action may be taken against a proposed freeway, against herbicide spraying, in favour of recycling legislation or in support of a new national park. The methods used depend on the individuals or groups involved and on the issues, and range from writing letters to parliamentarians or newspapers, lobbying politicians, producing and distributing leaflets, holding public meetings, holding demonstrations and using civil disobedience. In spite of the amount of effort involved in many such campaigns, they are often still ad hoc; indeed, activities are not coordinated into a coherent programme towards a long-term goal. Such campaigns are based on pressure group tactics, and presume the operation of a pluralist political system in which changes in policies are possible by the mobilisation of public opinion and pressure, especially on the government.

If social action on an environmental issue is sufficiently coherent, organised and sustained, it is appropriate to speak of an environmental movement. In a movement the otherwise ad hoc activities are tied together by a general goal and usually a sense of purpose and unity. Environmental movements often develop social goals associated with the environmental goals. The anti-nuclear power movement, for example, has promoted the 'soft energy path' alternative of energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources.

In the case of environmental movements, it is also appropriate to speak of strategies. A strategy can be characterised as a coherent set of tactics, methods and campaigns for achieving particular specified goals. Strategies usually take into account the social and political context and in particular the role of groups favourable, unfavourable and indifferent to the movement's goals. In some cases, movement strategies are carefully formulated, continually examined and redirected when necessary. More often strategies develop out of unspoken assumptions about how campaigns should be organised. In these cases the de facto strategies must be inferred from the activities of the movement.

Methods

In general, environmentalists use four particular types of methods of action: appeal-to-elites methods, electoral methods, labour-based methods and grassroots methods. These are far from exhaustive and are not mutually exclusive, but they do epitomise some of the key directions and divergences of social activists. Movement strategies can and often do involve more than one type of method. But if the main approach relies on a particular type of method, such as appeal to elites, then it may be appropriate to speak of an 'appeal-to-elites strategy'.

The assumptions of the appeal-to-elites approach underlie most social action on environmental issues. The basic idea is to convince key decision-makers in government and sometimes industry of the logic and justice behind taking action and making policy to solve environmental problems. Typical appeal-to-elites methods are writing letters to politicians, sending petitions to politicians, making submissions to environmental inquiries, lobbying politicians and government bureaucrats, and writing articles aimed at elite policymakers. The necessity for adopting such methods based on 'speaking truth to power' is seldom spelled out, but is simply assumed.

Electoral methods are based on actively intervening in parliamentary elections to support environmentally preferred policies, usually by supporting a party or running environmental candidates. In countries in which the dominant social democratic or communist party is unresponsive on environmental issues, such as in France and West Germany, parties with strong environmental orientations&emdash;'green parties'&emdash;have been started and promoted by environmentalists. The dominant social democratic party in Australia, the Australian Labour Party (ALP) has been relatively open to environmental policies. The small party, the Australian Democrats, has been even more sympathetic. For this reason no 'green party' has been considered necessary or viable in Australia. Therefore electoralism by Australian environmental movements has usually meant supporting and actively campaigning for the ALP and sometimes the Australian Democrats.

Labour-based methods look to the labour movement to further environmental goals. The two dominant formal structures most associated with the labour movement in Australia are the ALP and the trade unions. Many Australian trade unions have a tradition of activism on social issues, and in the 1970s this expanded to cover environmental issues. This receptivity, combined with the difficulties of using the Australian legal system to oppose development projects, led in the early 1970s to bans by builders' labourers on construction projects opposed by community groups on environmental grounds&emdash;the so-called 'green bans'. The labour movement is wider than just the official labour party and trade union structures, and includes for example independent workers~ initiatives such as wildcat strikes and labour-oriented research groups such as the TransNational Co-operative in Sydney.

The basic approach of a labour-based strategy to achieve environmental goals is to mobilise the labour movement to take action towards the goals. In Australia this typically means pushing for the adoption and implementation of environmental policies by the ALP and for environmental stands and direct action by trade unionists.

Grassroots methods aim at mobilising 'ordinary people' in all walks of life to promote social change by collectively changing their behaviour. Grassroots methods do not rely on support from elites for achieving their goals. Rather, they strongly encourage participation in a meaningful way by as many people as possible. A typical approach is to organise within a group of some sort&emdash;workers, church members, students, parents&emdash;at the level of the 'rank and file', by providing information, building networks, fostering development of skills and initiative, and taking action.

As mentioned before, considerable potential and actual overlap exists between those four types of methods. For example, all four are potentially components in a single approach of applying pressure to elites: by force of argument, by mobilising votes, by threat of industrial action, or by demonstrating citizen concern. Similarly, all the types of methods can be developed utilising grassroots methods: writing letters to politicians can be a way of encouraging people to be involved; social movement groups can be mobilised in election campaigns; and shop floor and party branch organising can be the basis for promoting labour movement concern on an issue.

Superficially, it might seem that convincing or pressuring elites holds the best chance of achieving environmental goals. The difficulty with this approach is that elites in government and industry are often the ones with the most interest in policies and practices which damage the environment. Chemical companies and electricity authorities, for example, depend for profits or bureaucratic expansion on the increasing use of their products. Those who rise to high positions in such organisations therefore have a strong stake in maintaining profit and expansion. Logical argument is notoriously inadequate to convince a person who maintains a vested interest in a contrary view. Political pressure on elites is more likely to achieve results, but the pressure must be maintained or the environmentally damaging practices may be reintroduced. But persistent and enduring political pressure is hard to sustain by social movements.

It is often assumed that any social movement of sufficient size and strength must enter electoral politics at some stage. It is worth spelling out some of the limitations of putting much energy into elections.

• It does not challenge existing structures such as the bureaucratic organisation of the state and the profit system. Rather, entering election campaigns reaffirms the value of existing structures.
• Focus on elections and dependence on sympathetic politicians does little to establish the social movement as a viable force outside the parliamentary arena. A basis for continuing struggle may not be established. Often after an exhausting election campaign, the movement virtually collapses.
• The sense of personal responsibility for environmental problems is given away to elected elites.
• Elected representatives, even those most responsive to community opinion, are still subject to intense pressures to adopt anti-environmental or 'compromise' policies. Politicians are constantly influenced by industrial lobbyists and top state bureaucrats. A more pervasive influence is the requirement to maintain economic expansion in order to finance government programmes. Politicians cannot afford to jeopardise 'business confidence' by anti-capitalist policies. The key goal of political action becomes survival in office. For these reasons elites, including elected representatives, cannot be relied on to enforce environmentally sound policies.
• Entering elections tends to polarise opinion on the environmental issue along party lines. Potential supporters in the party not supported become much harder to reach.
• Election campaigning often depends on key personalities, either as candidates themselves or as charismatic campaigners. This dependence, plus the need to coordinate policies, maintain party unity and not cause doctrinal splits, tends to centralise power in the social movement itself, to reduce meaningful participation and thus weaken the base of the movement.
• Strategies which do not depend on electioneering tend to be neglected.

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