‘Messers,Visionaries and Organobureaucrats’: Dilemmas of Institutionalisation in the Irish Organic Farming Movement

Abstract

This paper asks what happens to ‘alternative’ social movements like the Irish organic farming movement, which try to promote sustainable forms of rural development, when they begin to be incorporated into state policy for farming and the countryside. Does this provide a context in which farming and the food industry can begin to be ‘restructured from below’, or does it lead instead to ‘deradicalisation’ of the movement and its ideas? The European literature on ‘new’ or alternative social movements has focused more on mobilisation of such movements than on processes of institutionalisation and their effects. Yet institutionalisation is often experienced by movement members themselves as a critical, even highly divisive development, which can result in severe damage to the movement's core ideology and values. The Irish case discussed here is a starting point from which we may develop a more general understanding of the increasing institutionalisation of environmentalism in the contemporary developed world.