ABSTRACT
The case studies tell stories of powerlessness and incapacity, of how movements and collective action run up against stronger forces, internal fragmentation and failures of coordination. The ability to network (i.e. horizontal relations with other social actors) across social sectors is a major success factor for social movements but we do not know enough about who are participating in social movement networks, or whether there are significant groups who are not involved and thus the overall representativeness of the truly poor and marginalized. Those formed between social movements and highly influential organizations, like political parties in office, have both positive and negative effects on social movement goals. The benefits of rescaling (the ability to bring claims to ‘higher’ arenas and institutions where power is wielded) for social movements include accessing the legitimacy, capacities and resources that like-minded organizations elsewhere might possess. Yet rescaling as a basis for collective action can perpetuate the democratic deficit, generate organizational overreach, create coordination problems with grassroots bases, and supplant and replace locally based alliances. The authors note that there is little research on social movement networking and rescaling that uses the concept of ‘the Americas’ as a basis for the repoliticization of poverty. Despite commonly shared forces that produce poverty in both the North and the South, deeply entrenched dualism is one force working against both more research and a more substantial development of such cross-continental linkages and imaginaries.
