BROKER AND BUFFER: WHY ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS PARTICIPATE IN POPULAR PROTESTS IN CHINA * Yang Zhang † The social movement literature considers that institutional allies facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes, but it has not sufficiently analyzed how such alliances emerge and endure. This gap becomes more significant in nondemocratic settings, where institutional support of protests is monitored, restricted, and suppressed. Drawing upon fifty in-depth interviews, this article examines the variations of environmental nongovernmental organizations’ (NGO) parti- cipation in four popular protests in China. I find that environmental NGOs collaborated with grassroots protesters to varying degrees, ranging from minimal presence of information provision, policy advocacy, coalition building, to pervasive participation including protest mobilization. The degree of NGO participation cannot be explained by organizational resources, civic communities, or political environments; rather, it hinges on skillful agencies that broker otherwise disconnected resources and buffer political pressure for their partners. My research contributes to the relational approach to social movements and to studies on the interactions among social movements, NGOs, and the authoritarian state. In social movement studies, institutional allies are broadly regarded as one form of political opportunity structure (POS) for grassroots protesters (Gamson 1975; McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1994), but how their partnership emerges and endures has not been sufficiently addressed. 1 Institutional and insurgent actors often have different identities and interests and thus adopt distinctive agendas and repertoires. Their relationship becomes even more tenuous in authoritarian regimes with strong state power, because institutional actors risk severe consequences for co- ordinating with protestors (Chen and Moss 2018). Using nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as an example, this article investigates whether, how, and why institutional actors participate in popular protests despite these obvious constraints. The relationship between NGO environmentalism and grassroots environmental protest is a case in point. Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) and grassroots activists represent two characteristic types of environmental activism. ENGOs are often formal, routinized, and well-funded organi- zations comprised of professionals that work for broad environmental protection outside of the government but through institutional channels. By comparison, grassroots environmental activists—sometimes associated with NIMBYism (not in my backyard)—are temporarily mobilized to oppose specific projects, often in close proximity to their homes, which may have adverse effects on their health, community, or quality of life (Dokshin 2016; Michaud, Carlisle, and Smith 2008). Given their contrasting missions, institutional levels, organizational modes, and operational methods, these two groups typically follow separate paths towards environmental goals, which themselves are only tangentially related. Their relationship is even more subtle in “liberalized authoritarian” contexts (Moss 2014), given the state’s hybrid means to control civil society and social protests (Fu 2017; Heurlin 2010). * Yang Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC. Please direct all correspondence to him at yangz@american.edu. † My fieldwork was sponsored by the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, the Paulson Institute, and International Travel Award from American University. In American University, Molly Bradtke, Madeline Halvey, Yichen Hao, and Anh Ta provided excellent research assistance. During various stages of writing, Claire Brunel, Ken Conca, Daniel Esser, Jonathan Fox, Louis Goodman, Kevin O’Brien, and Rachel Robinson have offered me thoughtful suggestion. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. 2020 Mobilization: An International Journal 25(1):115-132 DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-25-1-115 Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/mobilization/article-pdf/25/1/115/2437359/i1086-671x-25-1-115.pdf by Kansas State Univ- Technical Services, John Smith on 07 May 2020