Page 162 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The new approach has proven especially useful for pursuit of public
policy at the state and local level. An official at ED reported that since
adopting its new strategy, the organization has found itself focusing its
interactions increasingly on local issues, because those are most success-
ful for the new mode of communication and mobilization. The group did
not,however,setouttousethenetworkthatway.Referringtoaffiliates,he
said, “The closer to home, the better. Ninety percent of action [requests]
have to be in members’ backyard” if they are to be successful. He said
that“bignationalissuesbecomebackgroundnoise,”becausecitizenswho
sign up with the group have specific interests that connect to their own
life situations, and because many tend to believe that national issues are
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insurmountable. An unintended consequence of the information-rich
approach to membership and collective action has been this pull toward
the local and a need for the organization to think like a network of lo-
cal or regional organizations rather than a centrally managed, unitary
structure. At Defenders of Wildlife, the combination of localism and se-
lective mobilization has also created an opportunity for the organization
to function as if it were a federation of local or regional units or as if it
operated subnational chapters, neither of which was the case historically.
By obtaining specific interests about citizen concerns in an inexpensive
way and then targeting calls for action, this monolithic national orga-
nization can operate as if it were a network of more regionally focused
organizations, each specializing in particular issues. Defenders believes
that much of the value of sophisticated information systems is the flex-
ibility it gives the organization to configure and reconfigure rapidly the
subsets of its body of affiliated citizens.
In some cases, environmental organizations find that the difference
between national and local issues is simply one of framing. In other
cases, local or regional issues really are just that. ED mobilized about 100
local affiliates in 2000 to contact the New England Fishery Management
Council regarding cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine. Because of public
and scientific concern about the fate of the fishery, the council adopted
a series of fishing restrictions aimed at reducing the cod harvest by 80
percent. Around the same time, the organization mobilized several thou-
sand affiliates to contact the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and members of
Congress from the Northeast asking for stronger protections for another
species, the spiny dogfish.

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Azar Moulaert, Environmental Defense, personal interview by Joe Gardner for the
author, May 13, 2000, New York, New York.
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