Abstract

The past 21 years have seen the UK environmental movement transform as climate change has become an urgent issue and broader publics have engaged in civil disobedience. More radical protest forms are curtailed by new legislation while large NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have repositioned themselves as more locally responsive (e.g. anti-fracking). This article uses a novel perceptive and mapping approach to political opportunity theory to compare networking in London’s environmental movement, 2002-3 to 2023-4. We compare our interview data (n=49) and an organisational network survey (n=66) from 2023-4 with data from 2002-3. We argue that structural opportunities vary little and so cannot explain contrasting networking patterns. We describe a set of contingent factors that have varied across the two different eras. These partly tally with activists’ own concerns about a recently emerged “grim political environment”. Our novel contribution shows that contingent factors shaping environmental activism have influenced activists’ perceptions of a closed polity, resulting in slightly more inclusive networks. Our key finding is that the centrality of climate change to contemporary environmental activism, the perceived urgency of the climate crisis and the government’s poor track record in slowing it, have resulted, cautiously, in networks that span what was once a more definitive radical-reformist divide.