Alejandro Ciordia

This new reconstruction of global whale biomass shows that countries can successfully tackle environmental problems when they come together

But it's a story with an under-recognised hero

🧵 1/

Welcome to the Strategic Climate Risk Initiative How can we stop the consequences of climate change from undermining climate action?

A year ago, Spain was hit by deadly floods

They were supercharged by climate change

Yet in their wake, climate-denying politicians gained influence - which risks undermining climate action, making people less safe

Today we publish new research on this troubling dynamic🧵
www.scri.org.uk/derailment

The Politics of Environmental Networks Thematic Issue, Vol 13 (2025)

If you’re interested in
🌱 environmental politics
🔄 social network analysis

…you might enjoy this piece and the rest of the "Politics of Environmental Networks" special issue in Politics and Governance.

📖 Check it out here 👉 www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...

Beyond our case study, our article shows that collaboration stems from a shifting balance between identities and interests, not a single stable logic.
Moments of political transformation don’t just open or close opportunities, they recalibrate the very grounds on which actors choose to cooperate.

In short, the Basque environmental field shifted from militant confrontation to pragmatic cooperation.
Yet this wasn’t a simple replacement of one logic with another, giving rise to a more pluralistic but less predictable network.

The results show a shifting balance of collaboration drivers. After 2011, political cleavages lost influence, while shared issue agendas remained more steady, though fluctuating, basis for cooperation. Interpersonal ties played only a minor role throughout.

Our statistical analyses reveal both continuity and change in collaboration logics.

Before 2011, ideological alignments strongly shaped collaboration. Afterward, their influence waned, while pragmatic ties based on shared issue agendas remained the most consistent driver.

Using original network data from 419 environmental events, we mapped how organizations in the Basque environmental field collaborated across 6 alternate years.

We asked:
1️⃣ How did collaboration drivers shift across protest cycles?
2️⃣ How did they change before and after the end of the conflict?

Our study applies this framework to examine how collaboration patterns among Basque environmental organizations evolved between 2007 and 2017, during a decade marked by the end of violent conflict and major ups and downs in environmental mobilization.

To address this gap, we propose a new analytical framework that captures the dynamic interplay between political context and the grounds on which collaboration is established, maintained, or dissolved.

Environmental activism (and activism more broadly) thrives on collaboration. Many factors have been studied as facilitators or barriers of interorganizational cooperation.

Yet one crucial question remains: how does the broader political context interact with these drivers of collaboration?

I’m very proud to share a newly published research article co-authored w/
@luigischiavo.bsky.social and Mario Diani, just out in Politics and Governance:

“Shifting Grounds of Collaboration in Changing Contexts: Evolving Environmental Networks in the Basque Country”
🔗 doi.org/10.17645/pag... 🥳🤗

Title and Abstract of the paper "Far-right contention in civil society: multiple lenses on action repertoires, actors, and targets". Authors: Hans Jonas Gunzelmann, Christin Jänicke Abstract: Over the past decade, the far right has been on the rise in civil societies across Europe. Civil society organizations have been challenged by the far right in governments, political parties, and within their own ranks. However, there is little systematic research on how the far right stirs conflict within civil society. Civil society research has tended to ignore ‘uncivil’ society and has instead focused on social capital and cohesion. Research on the noninstitutional side of the far right has been growing but has largely neglected the consequences for established civil society organizations and their members. This article addresses these blind spots by providing a conceptual framework and a methodology for studying the far right in civil society, which is applied to a case study. First, we construct a conceptual framework that adapts the contentious politics paradigm to the study of civil society. We delineate far-right contention within civil society and construct typologies of the action repertoires, actors, and targets. Second, we develop a methodology that combines different lenses to expand our view on far-right contention in civil society. We propose a mixed-methods research design for mapping far-right contentious events. Third, we apply our conceptual framework and methodology to the case of Germany by empirically mapping the action repertoires, actors and targets. Our findings fundamentally shift the scholarly understanding of the far right in civil society: We find that far-right contention in civil society goes well beyond adversarial actions by far-right actors. This has important implications for researchers and practitioners.

💫New paper out with @chjncke.bsky.social in @europeansocieties.bsky.social:

📝"Far-right contention in civil society: Multiple lenses on action repertoires, actors, and targets"

🧵A short thread about the paper:

Three excellent books on what the #ClimateEmergency means for higher education & how universities should respond 📚 🧵

1️⃣ Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis by @edufuturist.bsky.social

www.universitiesonfire.com

The Food Charities project had a kick-off meeting on Sept 24th at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute! PI Filippo Oncini @pipponcini.bsky.social gave a project overview, & postdoc Alejandro Ciordia @alexciordia.bsky.social presented on Events Sequence Analysis (key method for research module 1).

EU parliament votes to ban meat names for plant-based foods Pressure to ban meat labels for plant-based products comes from Europe's livestock farmers.

The @europarl.europa.eu just made a fool of itself with this ban. Is there evidence that consumers think a "veggie burger" contains meat? Utterly ridiculous, and just (further) undermines the credibility of the institution (at the behest of the EPP).
www.bbc.com/news/article...

We are very excited to share the launch of a special issue in Global Food Security!

👉 Understanding Food Insecurity in High-Income Countries: New Theoretical Approaches, Multidimensional Perspectives, and Innovative Practices and Policy Responses

Read more and find the link below🔽

Congratulations to @nuriatargarona.bsky.social (COALESCE Lab), Louise Ryan & @alexciordia.bsky.social (@erc-foodcharities.bsky.social / @sns.it) for their ⭐new article⭐ in @socresonline.bsky.social, discussing two visual tools to inductively explore social boundary making in relationships! #socsky

people's opinions are formed through a combination of long-lasting exposures and political socialization, and we should not expect one-shot experimental settings to *scale* in the first place.

this is such a needed correction to the "polarization" literature:

My role builds on my research on inter-organizational networks and civil society. I’ll be studying how charitable food fields took shape and transformed over the last decades, using a comparative and relational approach.

If you’re interested, follow the project here 👉 @foodcharities.bsky.social

Food Charities - At the heart of food support lies a web of relations Food Charities aims to uncover how these connections build, sustain, transform, and at times hinder responses to food insecurity across different contexts.

The project investigates through a mixed-methods approach how charitable food provision fields emerge and evolve, how are they governed, and what are their implications for poverty, food insecurity, and sustainability? 🍞🥬🌍

🔗 foodcharities.eu

Some belated professional news:

A few months ago I started working as a postdoc at Maastricht University on the exciting ERC project @erc-foodcharities.bsky.social led by @pipponcini.bsky.social

Really happy to be part of this international team, based at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute!

Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things.

I have taught in 5 countries for more than 25 years and I had never before been warned for being set-up and reported by my own students by university administrators… until this semester.

Nota: este es el mismo trato que reciben los presos americanos normalmente. El sistema penitenciario de Estados Unidos es un puto gulag desde hace décadas.

Our methodological open-access article (co-authors: Louise Ryan & @alexciordia.bsky.social), presenting new interactive visual tools to inductively explore social categorisation and boundary-making processes within personal networks, is out in Sociological Research Online doi.org/10.1177/1360...

Land availability and policy commitments limit global climate mitigation from forestation Forestation (afforestation and reforestation) could mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon within biomass and soils. However, global mitigation from forestation remains uncertain owing to vary...

The amount of carbon that forests can take up is much lower than previous estimates. If we don't reduce CO₂ emissions rapidly, we can say goodbye to the Paris climate targets forever.

Finally, I encourage you to check the rest of the special issue on relational outcomes of collective action, put together by Alessandra Lo Piccolo and Federica Stagni (doi.org/10.1177/0002...), as well as the amazing work carried out in the @coalescelab.bsky.social (coalesce-lab.com/en)

This study is part of the INCLUSIVITY project (inclusivitynorms.com/about-the-pr...) funded by the @volkswagenstiftung.de

This article might be particularly appealing for people interested in:
🧩 the biographical consequences of activism
🌐 personal network analysis
⚖️ the tension between social cohesion and polarization

Our findings show how political involvement transforms individuals' social environments in complex ways and complicate the view that civil society participation always builds bridges ➡️ In polarized contexts, activism may expand mostly ideologically homogeneous ties but also erode cross-cutting ones.