Sticky Tactics? Environmentalist Traditions and Anti-GMO Direct Action in France, Belgium, and Britain

This paper compares three protests against GM crops that targeted publicly funded research laboratories in France (2010), Belgium (2011) United Kingdom (2012). Using primary research with participants and observation of criminal trials that followed, we compare the three cases, While they were linked through a loose network of European campaigners against GM, the differences between them undermine the idea of a singular type of anti-GM movement or of movements focused on production and consumption. We examine how critics and advocates of GM interacted in each case and how the form of debate differed from those of the 1990s-early 2000s. For the protest movements, the engagement in debate with public research institutions changed the terms of debate compared to earlier protests against pariah companies such as BASF and Monsanto but did not change their own critique of GM fundamentally. Protesters also faced the challenge of revitalising a movement most of whose whose previous participants moved onto other issues. They also had to try to influence younger activists with no experience of the anti-GM campaigns of the 1990s-early 2000s. In these multiple engagements we can see evidence of both continuities and change with previous environmental politics of production and consumption. Direct action against genetically modified crops has interesting implications for the thesis of a new environmental politics of consumption. Micro-sociological analysis shows that those involved in direct action against GM are also participants in local practice-based prefigurative environmentalism, although the reverse is not necessarily the case. We compare recent anti-GM direct action with previous local environmental movements based on production and consumption and use these cross-national and cross-generational comparisons to develop an argument about collective learning in environmental movements, challenging the claims that the consumption-based practices of environmental movements reflect a fundamental change in the nature of environmentalism.