What is it about?

This article describes the campaigns organized by labor-community coalitions to reduce pollution created by petrochemical plants in Louisiana and Bahia by doing a comparative analysis of the actors and strategies followed in both situations. It is a comparison of two case studies of movements against chemical pollution by similar plants and somewhat similar populations in both countries.

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Why is it important?

Because it compares two different scenarios in two different countries and shows what was common and different in both cases, but it also highlights the factors that contributed to victories in both places. It adds to the literature on social movements for environmental justice by providing political analysis of the barriers and successes of a campaign that took place in a developed (US) and a developing country (Brazil).

Perspectives

This article was an early experience that I had to develop cross-national case comparison, which I did in significant detail in my dissertation. Thomas Estabrook had developed a comprehensive analysis of the campaign in Louisiana. We decided to do a cross-national comparison because both of us studied the petrochemical industry in the US and I had studied the political economy of the petrochemical industry in Brazil.

Dr. Eduardo Siqueira
University of Massachusetts Boston

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Labor‐community alliances in petrochemical regions in the United States and Brazil: What does it take to win?, Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2000, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10455750009358935.
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