Environmental Activism as Collective Action

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the ability to influence collective outcomes, and the selective costs/benefits of participation. The author tests the hypotheses of the collective interest model using data from a survey of 460 residents of a coastal watershed and national data on 1,606 respondents from the 1993 General Social Survey Environment Battery. The author’s findings corroborate several central propositions of the collective interest model and provide a theoretical account of environmental activism that synthesizes many previous results. “Think globally. Act locally.” Perhaps without knowing it, the coiners of this venerable call to arms captured the essence of environmental activism as collective action. Whether conceptualized as providing a clean environment, preventing the degradation of common-pool resources, or influencing the public policy process, environmental activism has public good characteristics. In particular, it is costly to exclude one person from enjoying the benefits produced by the environmental activism of another. Thus, rational citizens have an incentive to free ride on the activism of others, enjoying the benefits without paying the costs. Collective action problems occur when most citizens adhere to this logic, leading to an undersupply of environmental activism or oversupply of environmental harms (Hardin, 1982). Free-riding 431 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 34 No. 4, July 2002 431-454 © 2002 Sage Publications incentives are especially powerful in large groups—such as those facing global problems—where individual actions have only a minuscule influence on collective outcomes (Olson, 1970). Hence, to the extent acting locally increases the chance of influencing local environmental quality or policy, the rational citizen may perceive more benefits from environmental activism. Although political economists have long recognized the public good nature of environmental activism, models of individual behavior developed in environmental studies rarely address the logic of collective action. Consequently, models that relate environmental activism to perceived environmental threats, sociodemographic characteristics, and environmental values do not provide a satisfactory account of individual decision making that explains why these variables matter (Elliot, Seldon, & Regens, 1997; Jones & Dunlap, 1992; Mohai, 1985; Pelletier, Legault, & Tuson, 1996; Rohrschneider, 1990; Samdahl & Robertson, 1989; Seguin, Pelletier, & Hunsley, 1998). Many of these studies treat the influence of these factors as self-evident—for example, people who perceive environmental threats and have environmental values are more likely to act, without considering the calculus of individual decision making in a collective action setting. Even those studies that do consider collective action problems do not provide a general theoretical model of individual decision making (Diekman & Preisendorfer, 1998; Everett & Peirce, 1992; Karp, 1996). This article attempts to address the weaknesses in the literature by developing a model of environmental activism explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To do so, I adapt the collective interest model used in sociology and political science to explain protest behavior and social movement participation, which also have public good characteristics (Finkel & Muller, 1998; Finkel, Muller, & Opp, 1989; Gibson, 1997; Klandermans, 1984). The collective interest model posits that people will participate in a collective endeavor when the expected value of participation is positive. People judge the expected value by assessing the value of the public good, the probability their participation will affect collective outcomes, and the selective benefits/ costs of participation. By explicitly addressing the link between collective action and individual decision making, my adaptation of the collective interest model encompasses many of the variables from the laundry list considered by other environmental researchers. In the interest of methodological pluralism, I test the model using both a national sample of 1,606 U.S. citizens from the 1993 General Social Survey (GSS) that included a battery of questions about environmental issues and a survey of environmental attitudes among 460 residents from five towns on Eastern Long Island, New York, adjacent to the Peconic Bays estuarine watershed. Although neither survey was explicitly designed to test the 432 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / July 2002