The importance of national advocacy networks in shaping anti-corporate social movements

In 2009, Jika, a young villager from rural India who had become the spokesperson for an anti-mining campaign that had grown from a small, local and disorganised struggle to became a truly international movement, announced that he had transferred his loyalty away from the protest in favour of the mining corporation he had fought against.

The justification for this defection, he said in a video published on YouTube, was in part because the NGOs that had rallied to support villagers in their fight against the onset of destructive minerals-based industrialisation were working for their own selfish interests and not those of the communities they professed to represent.

Jika’s remarkable case forms the basis of a paper written by ERIM researchers <link people romy-kraemer>Romy Kraemer, Prof <link people gail-whiteman>Gail Whiteman, and Bobby Banerjee of Cass Business School, London. The paper, which has been published in the journal Organization Studies, illustrates for the first time the role national advocacy networks (NANs) play in shaping local resistance, and the national and transnational dynamics that are created when diverse actors come together to rally around grassroots protests and mobilise against a common target.

Uniquely, the research provides a much clearer picture of the processes involved in anti-corporate social movement organising and corporate counter-organising in general. Further, the authors highlight the need for a process approach in order to understand the dynamics that affect grassroots movements when they internationalise. 

• Download Conflict and astroturfing in Niyamgiri: the importance of national advocacy networks in anti-corporate social movements from Organization Studies.