“Frankly my dear, I don’t want a dam:" Environmental movements in differing political economies (a comparative study, Iran and US)

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Abstract

This study focuses on two water transfer projects to help uncover the nature of environmental movements and local communities’ resistance in two differing political economic systems, one is Iran, a centralized statist system in the South, the other is the U.S., a capitalist democracy in the North. The aim is to reveal how political economy limits or enables different types of resistance in response to proposed water projects. The paper’s main questions are: what are the environmental and socioeconomic reasons for the emergence of environmental movements in two different societies? What are the mechanisms of resistance or mobilization against water’s commodification in these different political economies?

I use Polanyi’s “Double Movement” theory ([1942] 2001), and also Gramsci’s theory of social movements to develop Polanyi’s theory of counter movements. Both theories help to understand how counter movements exercise different mechanisms against commodification of water in different political economic systems. This comparative study helps us understand how societies in different political economies react to commodification of nature. Moreover, the study expands Polanyi’s theory to an authoritarian governmental context and applies Gramsci’s theory to the specific environmental situation in two countries with different political economics.

I conducted 46 interviews (26 for Iran and 20 for Colorado) through a purposeful snowball sampling. I also conducted documents analysis for both cases. The results show although there are significant similarities in both cases, counter movements use different mechanisms according to their political economy.

Author

• Elham Hoominfar, Utah State University