Between Global and Grassroots: Transnational Conjunctures and Politics of Scales in South Korean Ecofeminist Organizing

• In Event: Microsociologies, Mezosociologies, and Macrosociologies: Scale, Level, Integration

Abstract

This paper examines how ecofeminist organizing in South Korea emerged through contested negotiations over scale during the period of democratic transition (1987–2002). Rather than treating the “global,” “national,” and “local” as pre-given analytical levels, I conceptualize scale as a relational and political accomplishment—produced through activist practices, institutional positioning, and struggles over legitimacy within a densely structured social movement field.
Building on transnational feminist theory and postcolonial and cultural approaches on organizational institutionalism, the paper reframes ecofeminism not as a coherent discourse diffused vertically from the global to the local, but as a traveling repertoire whose meaning and authority were reconstituted through multi-scalar negotiations. In the post-1995 Beijing context, ecofeminist discourse circulated through conferences, translation networks, and activist exchanges, while simultaneously taking shape through care-centered environmental practices rooted in households and community organizing. These engagements generated scalar tensions: between claims to global feminist legitimacy and the need for grassroots credibility; between professionalized NGO forms and community-based mobilization; and between plural feminist subjectivities and the desire for coherent collective identities for institutionalizing movement organizations.
Drawing on archival documents—including newsletters, manifestos, activists workshop proceedings, and policy proposals—the analysis identifies three analytic moves that illuminate the politics of scale: (1) brokerage as scalar mediation, through which actors translated global feminist vocabularies into locally resonant practices; (2) contestation over definitional authority, revealing how scale was invoked to authorize or delegitimize particular ecofeminist interpretations; and (3) field-level negotiations across community, state, and transnational arenas, demonstrating how movement actors strategically shifted scales to stabilize organizational identity and expand political opportunity.
By tracing how scale itself became an object of struggle—rather than a neutral backdrop for action—the paper contributes to a sociology of scale that foregrounds translation, legitimacy, and institutional friction. The case shows that norm change and movement-building unfolded not through linear diffusion across levels, but through recursive, multi-directional negotiations that continually reconfigured the relationship between the global and the grassroots.

Author

• Hanee Choi, Rutgers University-New Brunswick