Challenging the dominant path of forest policy? Bottom-up, citizen forest management initiatives in a top-down governance context in Poland

Forest governance in Poland is characterised by the dominance of public forest ownership and hierarchical, top-down policy-making. These governance arrangements, characteristic of post-socialist countries, have traditionally been challenged by environmental NGOs, advocating stronger protection of old-growths. Recently, institutional stability of the forest policy field has been increasingly influenced by numerous citizen initiatives responding to technocratic local forest management decisions. These initiatives, so far not analysed scientifically, vary in terms of the issues addressed, actions employed, and the local actors involved. In the paper we use a data base of 274 such initiatives to explore their manifestation, actors involved, main postulates, and the responses of forest managers. Based on this, we explored whether these initiatives pose challenges to the traditional forest management and, if so, what kind. We imply that the growth of bottom-up initiatives indicates a growing diversity of beliefs and values regarding forests and the increasing determination of local people to impact local environmental decisions. Furthermore, informed by the institutional theory, we argue that the growth of local initiatives, particularly during and after Covid-19 pandemics, suggests the eroding legitimacy of dominant rules and discourses. This process is particularly visible in sub-urban forests, which are increasingly seen through a ‘well-being discourse' that highlights cultural, regulative and supportive functions of forests, while putting less emphasis on provisioning functions. We also identify a networking trend among the initiatives that unifies their discursive background and enhances their influence at the national level. Therefore, local activists can be seen as a new advocacy group in the Polish forest policy subsystem. In response to local demands public forest administration has introduced institutional changes enhancing participation but their impact is still to be assessed. We recommend establishing a monitoring programme to track new participatory practices and to identify and promote best practices.

‘The slow pandemic': youth's climate activism and the stakes for youth movements under Covid-19

Pandemic conditions have affected social movement activity in various ways. In this article, we explore how young Cypriot climate activists, associated with the global Fridays for Future movement, attempt to integrate pandemic conditions in their mobilizing tactics, as well as how such conditions affect their collective youth agency. We first look into the strategic antagonistic framings they develop to counter dominant discourses of the pandemic as an unprecedented crisis and explore how these are informed by their understandings of, and emotions on, climate change as an effect of capitalism and overconsumption and as a type of ‘slow pandemic'. We argue that by extending climate change crisis discourse to encompass the cause of the pandemic, young activists assert temporality as continuity, rather than rupture, and challenge the distinction between the exceptional and the everyday on which Emergency governance is based on. By doing this, they unsettle adult hegemonic discourses on temporality, emergency and crisis that lead to an uneven world. Secondly, we reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on non-institutional youth activism by exploring the challenges these activists face to their sustenance and reproduction, given that access to public space, as we claim, is crucial for teenagers in developing the necessary relationality that is key for the maintenance of their social movement activity. We argue that youth movements emerge and operate within particular conditions which are currently under threat given the distinct mechanisms of governing populations engineered during Covid-19.

The politics of hate. Infection anxiety and defense

The article approaches the attraction of hate politics via reflections on the dilemmas and resistances that get in the way of its analysis. Sociopsychological investigation of the new political movements that seek communality by way of highly negative affects (such as the protests against measures designed to contain the COVID pandemic) is impeded by the emotional involvement displayed by researchers. Encounters with hostility and hate are invasive in their impact, jeopardize psychic integrity, and spell the demise of curiosity and empathy. Equally threatening is the normative proximity to central topic of these movements: the idealization of criticism, resistance, and autonomy. The regressive temptations held out by hate politics may arouse feelings of envy. Defense operations are undertaken to counteract contamination, involuntary proximity, and envy. These include leaving the field, cathexis withdrawal, and the adoption of the logic of splitting and devaluation. Maneuvers of this kind are also discernible in research on the subject. Keeping one's distance means not learning anything new;letting oneself be drawn in means becoming a part of the very dynamic one is investigating. In research, this leads to a moralizing implementation of defense against anxiety and powerlessness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (French) Le texte evoque l'attrait de la haine en politique et etudie les dilemmes et les resistances qui en compliquent l'analyse. L'etude sociopsychologique des nouveaux mouvements politiques qui forment des communautes par le biais de puissants affects negatifs (comme les protestations contre les mesures visant a endiguer la pandemie de Corona) est rendue difficile par l'implication emotionnelle des chercheurs. La rencontre avec l'hostilite et la haine a un effet invasif, met en danger l'integrite psychique et fait disparaitre la curiosite et la disposition a l'empathie. La proximite normative avec les topoi centraux de ces mouvements-l'idealisation de la critique, de la resistance et de l'autonomie-est egalement menacante. L'offre regressive de la haine peut eveiller des sentiments d'envie. On cherche a contrecarrer la contamination, la proximite non souhaitee et l'envie par des manoeuvres de defense : evitement et retrait de l'investissement, adoption d'une logique de clivage et de devalorisation. La recherche est egalement tentee par de telles manoeuvres. Celui qui prend ses distances n'apprend rien de nouveau. Celui qui se laisse atteindre devient lui-meme partie prenante de la dynamique qu'il veut etudier et sa recherche aboutit a des actions moralisatrices de defense contre l'angoisse et l'impuissance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (German) Der Text nahert sich der Attraktion von Hasspolitik uber eine Reflexion der Dilemmata und Widerstande, die sich ihrer Analyse in den Weg stellen. Die sozialpsychologische Untersuchung der neuen politischen Bewegungen, die sich uber starke negative Affekte vergemeinschaften (wie die Proteste gegen die Masnahmen zur Eindammung der Corona-Pandemie), werden durch die emotionale Beteiligung von Forschern erschwert. Die Begegnung mit Feindseligkeit und Hass wirkt invasiv, gefahrdet die psychische Integritat und lasst Neugier und Empathiebereitschaft schwinden. Bedrohlich wirkt auch die normative Nahe zu zentralen Topoi dieser Bewegungen-der Idealisierung von Kritik, Widerstand und Autonomie. Das regressive Angebot von Hasspolitik kann Gefuhle von Neid wecken. Der Kontamination, der ungewollten Nahe und dem Neid sucht man durch Abwehroperationen gegenzusteuern: Aus-dem-Felde-Gehen und Besetzungsentzug, Ubernahme der Spaltungs- und Entwertungslogik. Zu solchen Manovern ist man auch in der Forschung versucht. Wer sich distanziert, erfahrt nichts Neues. Wer sich erreichen lasst, wird selber Teil der Dynamik, die er untersuchen will, und gerat in seiner Forschung in moralisierendes Agieren der Abwehr von Angst und Ohnmacht. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Direito à moradia: as ações do Museu das Remoções durante a pandemia

A luta pelo direito à moradia no Brasil continuou existindo durante a pandemia de Covid-19 e precisou adotar novas estratégias diante das restrições sanitárias. Este artigo aborda as reivindicações do movimento do Museu das Remoções e sua atuação em defesa do direito à moradia. A pesquisa baseia-se em dados qualitativos da transcrição de debates realizados em 2020 e 2021 pelo Museu das Remoções com outros movimentos sociais na Internet. Os resultados revelam que os principais desafios enfrentados por movimentos sociais durante a pandemia foram a insuficiência do Estado brasileiro em assegurar o direito à moradia com dignidade nas cidades e a contínua violência nos despejos e nas remoções ocorridos mesmo diante das restrições sanitárias. A pesquisa mostra que a disputa por territórios nos centros urbanos atende fundamentalmente aos interesses do capitalismo imobiliário, capaz de inviabilizar inclusive o cumprimento de medidas sanitárias em saúde pública em meio a uma pandemia com elevada letalidade.Alternate :The struggle for the right to housing in Brazil continued to exist during the Covid-19 pandemic and had to adopt new strategies in the face of health restrictions. This article addresses the demands of the Museum of Removals movement and its performance in defense of the right to housing. The research is based on qualitative data from the transcript of debates held in 2020 and 2021 by the Removals Museum with other social movements on the internet. The results reveal that the main challenges faced by social movements during the pandemic were the failure of the Brazilian State to ensure the right to housing with dignity in cities and the continuous violence in evictions and removals that occurred even in the face of health restrictions. The research shows that the dispute over territories in urban centers fundamentally serves the interests of real estate capitalism, capable of even making it impossible to comply with sanitary measures in public health in the midst of a pandemic with high lethality.

The Key Role of Social Movements in Protecting the Health of People and the Planet Comment on "Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy"

In his recent article, titled "Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy," Ronald Labonte addresses a key challenge the world is facing, trying to 'build back' after the global crisis related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He explores and critically examines different policy options, from a more inclusive 'stakeholder model' of capitalism, to a greater role of states in shaping markets and investing in the protection of health and the environment, to more radical options that propose to reframe the capitalist mantra of growth and look at different ways to value and center our societies around what really matters most to protect life. Social movements are key players in such transformation, however the political space they move in is progressively shrinking.

The hybrid political role of feminism on Twitter during COVID-19: SISMA Mujer in Colombia.

Twitter proved to be strategic for the dissemination of information, and for the activation of feminist social movements. This article identifies the patterns of representation around feminist movements on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the discourse around a Colombian NGO known as Sisma Mujer, in a corpus of 4415 tweets posted during the first year of COVID-19. The results showed five significant topic categories: gender-based violence, women in peacebuilding, women's human rights, gender equality, and social protest. This activity re-contextualized the online activism of this movement into a new, hybrid role with important political implications for the social movement. Our analysis highlights this role by pointing out how feminist activists framed gender-based violence to generate a discourse on Twitter.

Irreparable Damage: International Housing Rights and Local Housing Struggles in Rome after 2020

The recent interventions of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) to suspend evictions of tenants in Rome, Italy, allows us to shed light into the forthcoming social catastrophe caused by Italian housing policies, and into the new advancements of social movements for housing. As two scholar-activists involved both in research on housing and in political actions to prevent evictions, we describe how housing movements in Rome are facing the contradictions between local and international discourses on the right to housing.

Queering Diasporic Desi Solidarity: South Asian Activism in US and UK Multiracial Social Movements

This article explores the linkages between queerness, racialization, activism, and community care in the South Asian diaspora. It examines activism, organizing, and social movement work practiced by queer diasporic South Asians in the UK and the United States. By analyzing the South Asian activist relationship to, and solidarity and partnership with, Black liberation activism, this article conceptualizes a framing of queer South Asian diasporic solidarity. This solidarity is framed through contrasting articulations of joint struggle, allyship, and kinship in queer communities. To articulate this struggle, the article contrasts histories of South Asian racialization, politicization, and queerness in the UK and the United States, and synthesizes first-person activist accounts of modern-day queer South Asian activists in the diaspora. Finally, it argues that queer feminist South Asian activists in both countries are employing a model of queered solidarity with Black activists and Black liberation, though in differing forms in each country, that centers queer intimacies and anti-patriarchal modes of organizing for liberation across queer communities of color.

The Slow Food Movement and the Terra-Madre project: food sovereignty and translocal assemblages

Since 2004 the SF Movement has developed a global community of food producers and activists called Terra-Madre. Every two years representatives of the community meet in Turin for five days of workshops and conferences. Due to Covid-19 crisis SF has radically changed the nature of the meeting, presenting a six-month calendar of digital and physical events around the world. The paper examines the exchange occurring between communities as a form of translocal activism and considers to what extent SF can be defined as a movement for food sovereignty. It draws on digital data collection on the online activities and research with participants involving semi-structured interviews and observation notes. The paper reflects on the experience of digital fieldwork and how the new format of Terra-Madre provides insights into SF as a translocal movement characterized by conflicts, common perspectives and emergent capabilities. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Globalizations is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Politics During and After Covid-19: Science, Health and Social Protest

Covid-19 represented a total social fact, especially for that part of the world (the so-called Global North and in particular its wealthier component) which is less used to face dramatic crises able to affect fundamental rights and provoke health threats on a daily basis. While acknowledging its enormous impact on individual biographies, political systems and socio-economic equilibria around the planet, however we contrast those interpretations that have tended to naturalize the pandemic event, reading it as unpredictable, unique, disconnected from the dynamics that guide the (mainstream) Western lifestyle and mode of production. On the contrary, the genesis and above all the management of Covid-19 are the result and the mirror of broader dynamics linked to modernity, colonialism, capitalism, in one word of the Capitalocene. For this reason, it is even more correct to speak of a syndemic, to underline the environmental determinants of health, and the social and economic inequalities (re)produced by Covid-19. We therefore consider that interpreting the pandemic/syndemic (and its governance) as a state of exception is at least partial, being instead more useful to identify its unveiling function, able to make some latent or less visible dynamics manifest. Based on such premises, we focus on some nodes of the syndemic governance, highlighting how this contributed to give continuity and accelerate typical dynamics of a neoliberal governance and worldvision. We deal in particular with four key issues: the treatment of "science " by the media;the political history of "public health " and its relationship to the modern state;the construction of legitimate dissent vs. the constructed irrationality of "conspiracy theory ";the outcomes of social protests and in particular their pathologization in the mediatic and public debate. These are also among the main topics which are critically discussed in the thirteen papers that compose this Special Issue, from a variety of disciplinary fields, and with diverse epistemological perspectives and methodological tools.

Housing Activism and Urban Space during the Covid19 Pandemic. Research Notes on the Bairro of Arroios, Lisbon

This paper presents some research notes from an on-going project on housing activism in Lisbon in the last decade, describing its ascendant trajectory (2012-2019) and the impact that the Covid epidemic had on the local activist community (2020-2022). In particular, the paper focuses on two of the main protagonists of local housing activism, the association Habita and the collective Stop Despejos, and on the relation that they have developed in time with an ecosystem (of sites, groups, projects) that have developed in the last ten years in the neighbourhood of Arroios, which have found a characteristic spatial infrastructure in the coletividades (a Portuguese expression that identifies spaces managed by no-profit associations or collectives). The paper examines this relation against the background of two bodies of literature, namely contributions that have examined (i) the nexus between collective action and space and (ii) the different forms of political agency represented by the conceptual pole of "contentious" and "everyday politics". This research is based on extensive data collection (through ethnographic notes, documental analysis, and in-depth interviews, 2020-2022) and on the authors' status of insiders in the process observed.

Mutual aid and solidarity politics in times of emergency: direct social action and temporality in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. This article analyses these initiatives as direct social actions: actions that do not primarily focus on claiming something from the state or other power holders, but instead on directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself. The article addresses the impact of the temporality of emergency on solidarity politics by employing a series of qualitative interviews and choosing to place the analysis of mutual aid initiatives that developed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in longer pathways of engagement in direct social action. While many of these initiatives were strongly rooted in the Italian social movement and civil society landscape and the choice to engage in mutual aid activities was the result of long years of reflection and planning, the article shows how strongly the temporality of emergency affected the nature of these initiatives, their development and their outcomes, in particular with regard to the extraordinary number of people who volunteered and their relationship with politicisation processes. Through this analysis, the article aims to contribute to the understanding of a crucial form of action and the influence of exceptional contexts on collective action. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The Configuration of a Multi-Pronged Housing Movement in Barcelona

The housing movement that emerged in Spanish cities during the 2007–8 global financial crisis has undergone various mutations. If at first it was led by the anti-evictions fight of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups of the 15M mobilization cycle (2011–14), the successive rent crises since 2013 and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–22) have given rise to new activist expressions—housing/neighborhood unions (sindicats d'habitatge / de barri) and a tenants' union—in metropolitan areas such as Barcelona. These have played a central role in housing organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article we investigate the development of the housing/neighborhood unions while understanding their relationships with other housing groups in Barcelona. We first aim to know if, how, and why they have adopted, modified, or replaced the protest repertoires used by the PAH and the tenants' union and, second, to what extent the local housing movement in Barcelona evolved into a more diverse and multi-pronged configuration. Our findings indicate significant divergences between these housing organizations but also a common and complementary field of activism that eventually proved to be resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Year 2020: How Will It Impact Identities of Children and Youth over Time?

In this Editorial, as the Guest Editor to the Special Issue on Youth Identity, I reflect on the year 2020. The year was a challenging one in relation to the global impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the continued inequities and systemic injustices faced by racialized populations. As an intersectionality-informed identity researcher, I argue that because of the complexity of our individual and collective identities, identity scholarship is not limited to a particular discipline, or theory, or methodology.

Struggles and discourses for the right to health in times of pandemic: a demand in motion?

The global pandemic situation of recent years has led to focus on health systems. In Colombia, before and during the health emergency, conflicts and mobilizations have been generated around the right to health and its concomitant debate on the way the General Social Security Health System was conceived. This research article situates the reader in the assessment made by the subaltern sectors of the health system, reviewing their demands and proposals. It also provides a critical perspective on the hegemonic struggle that is currently taking place in the health field. The text was constructed from an interpretative and critical epistemological perspective, and a qualitative approach. It combined techniques as participant observation, analysis of the speeches and pronouncements of activists posted on social networks, by dissimilar trade union, and community organizations, as well as conferences, lectures, and academic papers published in alternative journals or newspapers in recent years © 2023, Revista Colombiana de Sociologia.All Rights Reserved.

Generation climate change

The focus for this Forum is the new, or perhaps youth, climate movement starting with the school strikes in 2018, growing in intensity and significance through 2019, stifled by the Covid-19 pandemic, but continuing to build hope in what may be a more ecologically sustainable global society as a result of the enforced slowing down and cooling down of hitherto overheated and unsustainable globalisation, as a result of the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Caring Democracy Now: Neighborhood Support Networks in the Wake of the 15-M

In 2011 the Indignados traced a line of flight from austerity policies. They invented unprecedented spaces for participation, re-imagined Spanish democracy and turned their attention to forms of life as spaces for political transformation. Their practices enacted a collective sensitivity that challenged the regime of impotence blocking their lives. The global financial crisis was denying them a future, and their ability to think and act together. Ten years later, while the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the world's normal course, self-organizing neighbours updated the Indignados' sensibility and methods. This article analyses the neighborhood support networks created by the Mutual Aid Groups (GAM) in A Coruña, Spain, during the lockdown in March 2020. As the government urged people to stay at home and obey the public health directives, the GAM took care of vulnerable life and democracy, threatened today by new authoritarian drives. From the standpoint of the ethics of care and an interest in experimental social movements, we discuss the power of a caring democracy, which sustains life and renews the democratic turn of the 15-M.

"Vem pra rua” ou "fica em casa”?

This article addresses the use of public spaces by organized movements that led thousands of people to the streets between March 2015 and March 2016 and culminated in the President Dilma Rousseff impeachment. It starts from the premise that although the organization of these manifestations occurred through social networks, it was in the appropriation of public space by respective groups that they took place. In a timider way, due to the COVID 19 pandemic, the protesters returned to the streets in 2020. For the research, we used the theoretical contribution of urban space structuration and its symbolic dimension, followed by the compilation of information regarding protests published at major newspapers in circulation. The balance shows that the location of social manifestations followed the symbolic logic of urban space structuration, where the group opposed to the impeachment had its space of demonstration associated with the main center of cities and the groups that demanded the withdrawal of President Roussef occupied the spaces identified with the reproduction of financial capital and/or elite housing. This logic was maintained during the demonstrations that took place in 2020. © 2022 Universidad Nacional de Colombia. All rights reserved.

Young people from popular neighbourhoods and engagements in Île de France. A look from the health crisis

This article discusses the activities and forms of engagement developed by the young people from popular neighbourhoods of the Parisian region in their experience of confinement by the pandemic COVID-19, in the spring of 2020. Does the social and urban situation of this youth give it a specificity? What forms and processes of engagement does it develop? From this point of view, what allows us to grasp the health crisis and its management in the popular neighbourhoods? Our results, based on a participatory research with young people, carried out between 2018 and 2021 in ten popular neighbourhoods, show how the health crisis has accentuated and made visible the situations of social inequality and discrimination in these neighbourhoods. They also stress the importance of the solidarity networks that were activated and the diversity of modalities of engagement of these young people, the vast majority of whom are of immigrant origin. © Marie-Hélène Bacquè.

Movement pedagogies in pandemic times: Extinction Rebellion Netherlands and (un)learning from the margins

This article is based on activist research conducted alongside Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. By taking a pedagogical approach to social movements, it posits that Extinction Rebellion Netherlands is simultaneously bound up in the reproduction of and resistance to dominant ways of knowing and being. It discusses how ‘pedagogies of urgency' reproduce the learning of hegemonic forms of life associated with modernity/coloniality. Treating the movement's margins as a privileged space of epistemological possibility, it examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing' [Motta & Esteves. (2014). Reinventing emancipation in the 21st century: The pedagogical practices of social movements. Interface, 6(1), 1–24, p. 5)]. This has facilitated the unlearning of pedagogies of urgency, and the learning of new relationships, subjectivities and knowledges that centre justice, prefiguration, and building relations across difference. Nevertheless, the pandemic also underscores some of the impossibilities for learning and dialogue inherent in the exclusions and violence at the heart of modern/colonial power relations.