1 Kopentx7 Neither Decline nor Sclerosis: The Organisational Structure of the German Environmental Movement 1 Dieter Rucht and Jochen Roose Whereas the mass psychologists around the turn to the 19 th century perceived social movements as amorphous groups, which grow by some kind of “contagion”, those who were closer to movements were always aware that these have an organisational structure. This was evident, for example, to the leaders, activists and analysts of the labour movement. But only with the rise of the resource mobilisation approach in the 1970s, social movement organisations (SMOs) became a subject of systematic investigation at both a theoretical and empirical level (Curtis and Zurcher 1974; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Zald and McCarthy 1980; Jenkins 1983; Lofland 1996; Kriesi 1996). Scholars have identified a broad variety of SMOs and their empirical links. Even when acknowledging the existence of SMOs as the backbone of social movements, we should stress that movements, as a whole, are not formal organisations. Unlike some of their components, social movements have no membership forms and no executive boards. Rather they represent a more or less dense network of networks (Neidhardt 1985) of different organisational elements, ranging from informal local groups to national and international associations, and probably even including political parties. We refer to such an entity of network as a movement’s organisational structure, trying to avoid the economic bias of the notion “social movement industry” that has been suggested by proponents of the resource mobilisation approach (Zald and McCarthy 1980). In this paper, we concentrate on the present organisational structure of the German environmental movement, including East Germany. Unlike the movement’s protest activities and claims that are deliberately exposed to the public, the underlying structure remains largely 1 Paper prepared for presentation at the ECPR Joint Workshops, Copenhagen, 14-19 April, 2000. Jochen Roose was supported by a DAAD doctoral stipend within the framework of the joint university special programme (HSP III) of the German federal state and the Länder. We are grateful to Annika Zorn who has co-organised the empirical work underlying this chapter. We also with to thank Amanda Dalessi for her editorial assistance.