Changing context, shifting grounds of collaboration: evolving environmental networks in the Basque Country

Interorganizational collaboration is a fundamental resource of collective action and political activism. In the study of environmental politics, social network analysis tools have been increasingly used for analyzing collaboration and alliances between formal and informal actors engaged in extra-institutional environmental advocacy. While the academic literature has identified a growing number of factors that facilitate or hinder collaboration among collective actors, less attention has been paid to how these may vary over time, especially in the face of sudden transformations in the political context. This article aims to address this gap by examining the extent to which abrupt shifts in the political context can modify the grounds on which collective action collaborative relationships are established and sustained. Leveraging a diachronic network dataset of interorganizational collaboration in the environmental collective action field in the Basque Country (Spain) between the years 2007 and 2017, we examine the role of large-scale transformative events and cycles of contention in moderating the influence of different kinds of dyadic predictors of collaborative ties. Using QAP regressions, we examine the relative weight of 11 determinants of event co-attendance at six alternate yearly observations. While during the last years of violent conflict, shared identification with Basque nationalism facilitated collaboration and disagreements over ETA’s armed struggle acted as a deterrent, these ideological factors have become insignificant in the post-conflict phase at the same time that pragmatic considerations have acquired a more significant role as drivers of interorganizational collaboration. In summary, the empirical evidence suggests that the Basque environmental collective action field transitioned from a model of “militant confrontation” to one of “pragmatic cooperation”. In the new scenario, common interests and practical considerations seem to take precedence over ideological congruence as predictors of interorganizational collaboration.