ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the profile of the environmental movement's grassroots activists affected its interaction with changing political opportunity structures. It illustrates how activists' distinctive biographical profile influenced the movement's repertoire of collective action. The chapter examines the movement's interplay with changing political opportunity structures. Compared with the labor and women's movements, the environmental movement was the most broadly mobilized grassroots social movement during Taiwan's democratic transition. Based on its grassroots membership mobilization, the environmental movement can be analyzed on two levels, national and local. If changing political opportunities affected the development of the environmental movement, then people can observe the impact of diminishing resources along with activists' shifting involvement from the movement to electoral politics. Many activists shifted their involvement from social movements to electoral politics based on their individual rationale, like career advancement, or their original ideological beliefs.
