Why social movements?

At first blush it might seem odd to accord a prominent conceptual spot to the study of social movements in a volume on “global projects.” And indeed, if this volume had been put together thirty to forty years ago, it would not have been necessary. But the world was a very different place in, say, the mid-1970s. In much of the developing world at that time the main challenges to large infrastructure projects remained primarily technical and/or engineering in nature. Not so anymore. Today virtually all the big technical challenges to such projects have been solved. The primary threats to global infrastructure projects now take the form of misunderstandings and conflicts resulting from conflicting institutional frameworks or from the reactive mobilization by grassroots groups and/or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) opposed to construction. This chapter details the challenges posed by the latter source: collective movements resistant to development.

The emergence of reactive mobilizing groups mirrors an earlier shift toward resistance to infrastructure projects that occurred in the democratic West. Such projects were almost invariably completed in the first five to six decades of the twentieth century, but resistance to such projects increased substantially in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, as the rise of the New Left in the US and the “new social movements” in Western Europe, dramatically increased the general levels of social movement activity in those countries.