Protest and Regulation in the Context of Social and Environmental Justice

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This topic critically examines the range of activities that challenge regulatory norms in attempts to secure social and environmental justice. The broad reading of protest envisioned by this topic encompasses protest as including not only overt forms, such as demonstrations and media campaigns championed by activist groups and civil society, but also principled non-compliance or defiance of laws and regulations as well as new initiatives, technologies and alternative business forms. In thinking about these activities papers could focus on the use of technologies, alternative business forms as well as the use of ‘playful’ forms, such as games and pop-up republics.  These challenges often reveal how regulatory systems consistently fail to address significant and growing social inequality and multiple ecological challenges.

 

The papers will identify how activities draw attention to, undermine and threaten dominant regulatory norms, norms centred on ameliorating the negative consequences of capitalist economic relations through the development of multiple discrete regulatory regimes. Papers will explore how, in calling attention to dominant norms, regulatory systems can be redesigned to enable social and environmental justice. Papers will examine how these diverse forms are alternately successfully resisted by governments, political parties, regulators and incumbent businesses, tolerated as marginal initiatives or lead to significant broader scale reform. Further, the research and analysis presented here will shed new light on how reform demands are institutionalised and how that institutionalisation process either enhances or undermines progressive change. Such institutionalisation can include the inclusion of the same groups who led the protest – a shift from an outsider to insider status, such as in the case of multi-stakeholder initiatives in forestry, tea and palm oil and housing cooperatives. The papers will also reveal the way protest cuts across regulatory regimes and regulatory agencies, posing challenges for those demanding change as well as those ‘within the tent’ that may wish to respond yet are challenged by the narrow remit of many traditional agencies.

 

Conveners

Fiona Haines (f.haines@unimelb.edu.au); Morag McDermont (Morag.McDermont@bristol.ac.uk); Bronwen Morgan (b.morgan@unsw.edu.au)