ABSTRACT
How can commonalities in the economic structures and differences in the political subcultures of Tuscany and Veneto help us in understanding the similarities and variations in the local mobilization potential? This chapter focuses on the characteristics of «new environmentalism», by studying localities like Venice and Florence that have displayed a high level of sustained, episodic environmental contention. This political ethnography approach allows us to investigate, through direct observation, the properties and motivations of the actors composing the mobilization processes while collecting a variety and richness of fieldwork data that help in testing the main hypothesis as well as improving the accuracy of the explanations. The unit of analysis is presented here as a comparison among four mobilization processes against infrastructure projects in two localities with similar local economic structures but different political subcultures that allow us to look at some general tendencies and variations of grassroots expertise. The processes of reciprocal recruitment of activists, experts, citizens and political authorities happen in a context of technological complexity and cognitive uncertainty. In this sense, the phase of expertise and the knowledge production play a crucial role in political mobilizations that calls for a specific contextual analysis.
