Acting Globally, Thinking Locally? Prospects for a Global Environmental Movement

Because understanding of global environmental problems is very limited except amongst the most highly educated populations of the most industrialised countries, it is not surprising that the latter should dominate environmental movement action on global issues, and that other, less highly educated people should be involved principally in local environmental campaigns. However, the success of local campaigns depends increasingly on the actions of non-local actors, and solutions even to local environmental problems demand transnational organisation. Effective transnational environmental movement organisations, however, are neither democratically accountable nor simply universalist in their assumptions. The prospects of a genuinely global environmental movement may nevertheless be improved by education.