Submitted to Environment and Behavior

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decisionmaking explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this paper adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp (1989) to explain protest behavior, and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the ability to influence collective outcomes, and the selective costs/benefits of participation. I test the hypotheses of the collective interest model using data from a survey of 406 residents of a coastal watershed, and national data on 1,606 respondents from the 1993 General Social Survey Environment Battery. My findings corroborate several central propositions of the collective interest model, and provide a theoretical account of environmental activism that synthesizes many previous results. Environmental Activism as Collective Action “Think globally. Act locally”. Perhaps without knowing it, the coiners of this venerable call-to-arms captured the essence of environmental activism as collective action. Whether conceptualized as providing a clean environment, preventing the degradation of common-pool resources, or influencing the public policy process, environmental activism has public good characteristics. In particular, it is costly to exclude one person from enjoying the benefits produced by the environmental activism of another. Thus, rational citizens have an incentive to free-ride on the activism of others, enjoying the benefits without paying the costs. Collectiveaction problems occur when most citizens adhere to this logic, leading to an undersupply of environmental activism or oversupply of environmental harms (Hardin 1982). Free-riding incentives are especially powerful in large groups—such as those facing global problems— where individual actions have only a minuscule influence on collective outcomes (Olson 1970). Hence, to the extent acting locally increases the chance of influencing local environmental quality or policy, the rational citizen may perceive more benefits from environmental activism. While political economists have long-recognized the public good nature of environmental activism, models of individual behavior developed in environmental studies rarely address the logic of collective action. Consequently, models that relate environmental activism to perceived environmental threats, sociodemographic characteristics, and environmental values do not provide a satisfactory account of individual decision-making that explains why these variables matter (Elliot, Seldon, and Regens 1997; Jones and Dunlap 1992; Mohai 1985; Pelletier, Legault, and Tuson 1996; Rohrschneider 1990; Samdahl and Robertson 1989; Seguin, Pelletier, Hunsely 1998). Many of these studies treat the influence of these factors as self-evident—e.g., people who perceive environmental threats and have environmental values are more likely to act—