INTRODUCTION

The problems faced by so-called “risk societies” (Beck 1992), including environmental problems, are best understood within the context of what Santos (2002:72–75) has called the collapse or crisis of the model of “normal” social change and, in particular, the crisis of the strategies of hegemony and trust used by the state and based on two key institutions, law and science. Responses to this crisis have bred some innovative experiences in citizen action and democratic participation.

This chapter takes up these issues through the presentation and discussion of struggles over environmental law and policies in Portugal, a semiperipheral country within a core regional space of the world-system, the European Union. Our aim is threefold: to describe and discuss the interplay of the national and the European and global scales in the making of domestic environmental regulation and legality; to characterize the tensions and conflicts arising in the attempts to enact environmental policies invoking state legality in local settings; and, finally, to examine the emergence and the dynamics of collective actors in their struggles over the environment, as they articulate scales and modes of intervention and of legality while opposing national environmental policies and hegemonic appropriations of European and international environmental regulations. A case of conflict over waste disposal and management will be examined in detail. The final section discusses the case in the light of the set of issues raised by Santos (2002) on the conditions for counter-hegemonic appropriations of law.