ABSTRACT
Environmental issues have undergone a remarkable process of institutionalisation since the early 1980s. Whereas the environmental movement became the focus of a highly confrontational, anti-systemic, left-libertarian mass movement towards the end of the 1970s, environmental concerns gained high priority with the public and on political agenda only ten years later. This had effects on the discourse as well as the organisational field of environmental actors. Big organisations became the dominant actors on the field of environmental conflict; moral protest combined with professional marketing; confrontational strategies changed to dialogical and cooperative strategies. This raised severe identity problems which increased when environmental issues were pushed into the background by economic and social problems in the 1990s. The discourse of ‘sustainable development’, the new master frame of the environmental debate in Germany since the mid-1990s, has triggered institutional innovations particularly at local level which provide opportunities for the environmental movement to develop a new profile as a ‘glocal’ (global and local) actor of civil society.
