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This text examines the development of the Polish environmental movement as a lens through which to understand the "reconstruction of civil society" and the adaptation of a social movement to new political institutions. The book focuses on the period between Solidarity's formation in 1980 and the first years after the establishment of a Solidarity-led government in 1989. It argues that environmental groups, as a form of independent collective action aimed at changing official policies and institutions, were part of the larger social transformations that undermined communist rule.
The first book to trace the evolution of an independent environmental movement in Eastern Europe in both the concluding phases of communist rule and the contemporary post-communist era. It is a major accomplishment in both its exhaustive empirical detail and in how it weaves the history of the movement into recent theoretical debates, social movements, democratization, and civil society.
