Environmental protests- Should I stay or should I go? Reasons for not going

Sammanfattning: Abstract Devastating climate change, polluted oceans and biodiversity loss make up only a few of the issues facing the planet in the current man made environmental crisis. Many efforts have been made, but often failed in an attempt to mitigate the crisis. Many social scientists suggest that environmental movements have the potential of promoting change. In Spite of the impressive size of recent environmental protests, a majority of the people who care and are concerned about the environment, do not join these manifestations. This study aims at answering the question why people do not demonstrate for the environment despite being aware and concerned about the problems. A theoretical framework is developed, consisting of the prominent theories on protest participation, which is then used as the base for a survey. The survey, testing 12 different theories of the protest participation framework (PPF), was sent out to students in Lund and environmental groups in Malmö and Lund. Respondents (N=170) were divided into protesters (N=54) and non-protesters (N=116). Through a combination of exploratory data analysis and qualitative thematic coding, their answers were analyzed and compared. The results supported a majority of the theories in the PPF, except for social media, size of protests (thresholds) and perceived injustice. It was rather respondents perceptions of gains vs costs, anger & frustration as well as movement resources which had the highest marginal effect on protest participation. Moreover new variables emerged from the qualitative data, suggesting that the PPF could be developed further. When looking at the quantitative and qualitative data together, the variable of how respondents estimated the gains vs cost of demonstrating emerged as one of the most prominent reasons for not protesting.