The Fight for Ethical Fashion by Balsiger Philip

Author:Balsiger, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Who Participates, and How Much?

Who were the participants of the campaigns, and how many of them were there? According to an independent evaluation of the French campaign carried out to fulfill a requirement of EU funding, its petitions obtained 20,000 signatures in 1996, 80,000 in 1997, 140,000 in 1998, and 180,000 in 2002. The mobilizing force of the campaign thus steadily increased, following the growth of the local networks. The Swiss campaign had the same postcard campaign running over several years. According to indications one finds in campaign newsletters and in the magazine of the Bern Declaration, 48,000 postcards were sent in the campaign’s first year (1999), and a total of 70,000 until 2003. The French campaign mobilized more citizens, yet if one accounts for the population difference (France having almost 10 times more inhabitants than Switzerland), the Swiss campaign appears to have been the more successful. But the number of participants in the Swiss case cannot actually be directly calculated from the number of postcards sent, since one and the same person is likely to send more than one postcard. Accordingly, it is difficult, from these numbers, to draw any conclusion as to the relevance of the movement with regard to the country’s total population. Consumerist participation is also very difficult to measure. Firstly, the campaigns only give implicit recommendations and because their strategy is mostly one of ‘discursive political consumerism,’ and not an explicit boycott or buycott, its message is rather ambiguous. But even if they called for boycotts, measuring participation in boycotts is notoriously difficult (Friedman 1997).

There is more reliable data on the activists participating collectively in the campaign. In Switzerland, this concerned few people. Many of those participating offered only ad hoc support; just two groups that got involved over a long period of time were identified: the Globalance group, and the BD regional group. Overall, this makes for not more than two handfuls of activists. A quick assessment of their social properties, based on interviews and (in the case of the regional group) participant observation, shows that they were mainly young (that is, in their early to late twenties) and mostly students. Interviews with a number of volunteers from the BD regional group showed that while they all had different trajectories, they were all already characterized by various ties to NGOs, social movements or Parish associations in their childhood and adolescence, before they joined the group. In France, I can draw some conclusions on participants from the organizational data. It suggests that the social basis was both much broader and more diverse than in the Swiss case. From the beginning, the French campaign built on local activists of the different coalition organizations. An inventory dated August 8 2005 lists 114 such local coalitions. No data is available for the number of participants in each of them, but a reasonable estimation based on the experience files and indications I was given in interviews would say that they numbered somewhere between 5 and 15 members, whose degree of commitment in terms of time investment and participation certainly varied greatly.

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