Office for Environmental Programs - Theses

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    Power Shifts: A study of Agency in the Australian Environmental Movement
    Bock, Chante ( 2022)
    Successful environmental campaigns have become critical as the consequences of delayed action on climate change have become extreme in Australia with the frequency of floods, heat waves and bushfires severe. This research constitutes a qualitative study into how campaigners’ agency informs their strategies in the Australian environmental movement. Detailed data was gathered from 4 semi-structured interviews with campaigners in Australian in an effort to understand the relationships between campaigns and campaigner’s understandings of their agency. The data was thematically analyzed through the lens of Bourdieu’s sociological Practice theory of habitus and the field to find themes. Identified themes focused on the structure of the participant organisations such as: fundraising and financial independence; internal barriers like team relationships and burn-out; large external themes were power structures, like capitalism and campaigns strategies that related to those. The research suggests that organisations’ fundraising structures, as well as activist cultures held elements that acted as barriers towards campaigns at times. Campaigners were concerned that through the social cultures that they built around and within their organisations, they could be reproducing structures of capitalism and other systems of oppression. The thesis ends by offering theoretical and practical implications that the results hold, as well as recommendations and words of encouragement for the Australian environmental movement.