Why the "Green Mess": An Analysis of Key Political Tensions and Cleavages within the Sydney-Based Environment Movement in the 1989-1990 Period

This paper addresses issues related to the structure of social movements, the presence of diversity within movements and the management of the conflicts that diversity generates. It outlines and analyses the main dimensions of an unusually intense and bitter conflict that erupted between environmental activists in Sydney in the lead-up to the 1990 federal election. The paper's central argument is that the conflict analysed was a product of the incompatibility between one particular activist network's attempt to impose its political assessment on a cross-section of movement elites and the underlying segmentation, polycephaly and loose integration that characterises the movement's structure. While the paper uses the Sydney case study as an illustrative vehicle, the themes and issues discussed have a broader applicability in the analysis of environment movement dynamics.