This paper focuses on the relationship between the political context and of the inter- and intra-movement protest cooperation of collective actors involved in environmental protest in the Czech Republic between 1989 and 2010. It builds upon the complete set of protest events with environmental issues that took place after the fall of communism (N=678). More specifically, the paper focuses on the dynamics between the changing relevant political context (the setting of political institutions and political elite´s attitudes toward other actors), and the structure of protest coalitions. The agency variable is conceptualized within the paradigm of social network analysis (SNA) and captures the protest alliances as directed networks of participating actors within a given set of events (period). We focus on three key levels of protest coalition making. First, we explore structural properties of the overall cooperation patterns among various classes of actors that mobilized around “green” issues. Second, we focus on the ego-network of environmental SMOs as a single class of actors, dealing with the dynamics in types and organizational forms of their partners. Finally, we focus on intra-movement cooperation patterns on the level of organizations to see how particular “green” SMOs changed their mutual coalition strategies within the period under study. The aim of the paper is to compare the network characteristics of organized protest on these three levels across different periods of political context evolution in order to show how the shifts in political opportunity structure (POS) selectively promote and change the dynamics of the inter-organizational protest cooperation and how it affect the types of actors that are involved.
