Lost in translation: the environmental imaginary of place-based protest in Ireland

Grassroots environmental protest in Western Europe has not received much attention in the contentious politics literature and has either been explained as part of the wider environmental movement, as ‘Not in my backyard’ syndrome, or in relation to the process of institutionalisation. We argue that the phenomenon deserves attention in its own right, for empirical reasons – spontaneous protest against unwanted land use is on the increase at the heart of capitalist democracies – for practical reasons – the contributions of grassroots protest to policy-making and its capacity to revitalise democracy are well recognised – and for conceptual reasons - understanding its continuous emergence can provide valuable insights into the limits of environmental democracy, and help address the increasing legitimacy gap in the politics of nature. We propose that in order to understand the significance and sustained emergence of the phenomenon we turn to the field of political ecology, which, by combining a political economy analysis, a critical constructivist approach to the study of socio-ecological relations and a normative commitment to social and environmental justice, can provide an innovative outlook on grassroots environmental protest in Western capitalist democracies. We advocate this approach – moreover – as a way to bridge an unhelpful north-south conceptual dichotomy in the study of social protest and as a step towards decolonising social movements scholarship. Adopting the island of Ireland as a case study of a Western European country where grassroots protest is vibrant, we employ the concept of environmental imaginary to advance an understanding of two instances of protest within the island – the opposition to the Shannon LNG terminal and the opposition against gold mining in the Sperrins – as the negotiations of environmental imaginaries at odds with a hegemonic conception of the natural environment, competing to be heard and actualised.