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78 4 From Local to Global Expanding Participation in Clayoquot Sound The conflict in Clayoquot Sound began as a local issue concerning MacMillan Bloedel’s plans to log Meares Island. The industry and government’s response to the Meares conflict was not unlike their reaction to land-use conflicts prior to it: They made some concessions to environmentalists but offered these concessions “in the context of a strategy aimed at containing the movement” (J. Wilson 1990, 154). In the immediate wake of the Meares Island conflict, it looked as though the old patterns of containment might once again prevail. But by the end of 1993, when representatives from five Greenpeace offices around the world risked arrest in Clayoquot Sound, when three U.S. congressmen wrote a letter to Vice President Al Gore urging U.S. action to protect Clayoquot Sound, and when Japanese environmentalists started a boycott of B.C. forest products, it was clear that the government and industry had failed to contain the movement. How did participation in the conflict expand from a small group of highly committed local activists to an international ensemble of transnational environmental organizations, Hollywood celebrities, and European politicians? This chapter examines the strategies and tactics used by environmental advocacy groups to expand participation in the Clayoquot Sound conflict. It also analyzes the strategies of their opponents, who initially tried to contain participation in the conflict and later competed with environmental groups for allies and sympathetic audiences. The discussion focuses largely on processes of alliance building and the activation of “reference publics.” In focusing on building alliances and coalitions, I depart somewhat from recent research that assumes the presence of two or more competing “advocacy coalitions” in From Local to Global 79 any given policy conflict. Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s (1993, 1999) Advocacy Coalition Framework claims that advocacy coalitions form around a shared set of normative commitments and causal perceptions about a policy and work together to translate these beliefs into public policy. The process of forming alliances and involving new actors in a coalition, however, is largely unexplained in the model. To understand how conflicts expand, we must explain how coalitions form, including why organizations choose to join an alliance with other organizations (or not). To further this goal, this chapter explains the incentives on the parts of advocacy groups and organizations to engage in coordinated political activity. I use Michael Lipsky’s (1968, 1146) definition of allies as “third parties [who] are induced to join the conflict” and whose “value orientations . . . are sufficiently similar to those of the protesting group that concerted or coordinated action is possible.” Allied groups try to activate “reference publics”— the constituents—of officials who are capable of delivering policy benefits. According to Lipsky, reference publics do not formally join alliances with advocacy groups as much as put pressure on public officials to respond to the protesters. A third category of actor, namely that of “reluctant participant,” can be added to this list. These individuals and groups do not formally join alliances with the protesting group, nor do they use their influence to pressure decision makers to publicly respond to the protesting group. Rather, reluctant participants take action in response to an advocacy group’s tactics in ways that the group can use as evidence of its strength and power. The extraordinary success of B.C. forestry activists in building alliances, activating reference publics, and expanding the scope of participation more generally was due to three factors. First, the timing of the Clayoquot campaign made it easier to build alliances at home and abroad. As will be shown, the forest advocacy movement in British Columbia was well developed by the early 1990s but lacked a central focus: The Clayoquot campaign provided that focus. Internationally, transnational environmental groups sought a new angle on the rain forest issue in the face of declining issue salience; Clayoquot Sound’s rain forests offered a new twist on the issue because of their location in an industrialized country. Second, the leaders of the Clayoquot campaign induced others to join the conflict by tolerating multiple strategies and tactics, allowing groups and individuals to participate in numerous ways and to see their contribution as unique and necessary. Finally, leaders in the movement also kept the conflict over Clayoquot alive by regularly “moving the goalpost”; the continuing controversy provided a compelling rationale for groups...

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