Social Cohesion Environmentalism: Theorizing the New Wave of Social Alliances among Climate, Faith-Inspired and Social Justice Movements

The recent few years witnessed, in many parts of the world, the development of new forms of social and climate justice mobilizations bringing together students and youths, labour movements, climate justice movements, social justice movements and faith- inspired movement among others. Coming together, they demand for conjugated efforts to tackle labour, social and climate justice issues, not only as generational, but also and above all as intergenerational and transgenerational issues. In the face of such fast- evolving social partnerships and networks among traditionally opposed actors, two key questions come to mind: Which shared-values have contributed and still contribute in bringing together social actors that historically have often worked in isolation and, in certain contexts, following confrontational logics? Which suitable theoretical framework can render account of such new forms of environmentalist networking? The
analysis of these new forms of social mobilizations around the climate justice ideal cannot be appropriately carried out if we do not situate it in the broader context of social movements deployed around the world by organizations, social entrepreneurs, and activists to defend specific socio-political, economic or environmental causes. In this regard, the social movement approach broadly speaking and the new social movements approach, in particular, could be an important framework for rendering account of these new forms of social mobilizations. Moreover, the resource mobilization approach helps render account of the different types and symbolisms of resources mobilized by different actors in the socio-political and economico-environmental struggles in various contexts, including that of the Social Cohesion Environmentalism (SCE) that constitutes the essence of this article.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].