The changing grounds of activist collaboration in shifting political conjunctures: a diachronic analysis of environmental networks in the Basque Country

Collaborative networks are an important aspect of collective action and political activism of any kind. In the study of environmental politics, social network analysis tools have been increasingly used for analyzing collaboration and alliances between diverse range of formal and informal actors engaged in extra-institutional environmental advocacy. While the academic literature has identified a growing number of factors that facilitate or hinder collaboration among collective actors, less attention has been paid to how these may vary over time, especially in the face of sudden transformations of the political context. This article aims to address this gap by examining the extent to which abrupt shifts in the political context moderate the impact of more stable dyadic predictors of activist collaboration. Leveraging a diachronic network dataset of interorganizational collaboration in the environmental collective action field in the Basque Country (Spain) between the years 2007 and 2017, we examine the moderating role of cycles of contention and large-scale transformative or critical events. Using QAP regressions, we examine the relative weight of 11 determinants of event co-attendance at six alternate yearly observation. The study reveals that following the end of ETA's armed struggle, interpersonal relationships and practical considerations appear to play a more significant role in driving collaboration between organizations. This shift seems to have replaced the earlier prominence of ideological alignments. During the violent conflict's last years, shared identification with Basque nationalism facilitated collaboration, while disagreements over ETA's armed struggle acted as a deterrent. However, these factors have become insignificant in the post-conflict phase. In summary, the empirical evidence suggests a shift from a previously dominant model of 'militant confrontation' to one of 'pragmatic cooperation' at the organizational level. In this new model, common interests and practical considerations seem to take precedence over ideological congruence as predictors of interorganizational collaboration.