How networks of social movement issues motivate climate resistance.

How do individuals make sense of the specific issues that motivate them when they participate in activism? Are there clear and consistent patterns of motivations among participants and organizers within a movement over time? This paper applies network methods to a unique dataset to understand the relationships and structure formed among the issues that activists cited as motivation for their participation in a series of climate-related demonstrations over a three-year period. We test whether these networks of issue motivations form coherent structures, and whether they reflect the growing emphasis on social justice within the climate movement. Our findings highlight the coherence in the structure of relationships among motivations to participate, especially the centrality of 'Equality' as a motivation within our sampled cycle of contention. • We summarize key findings from 4 surveys of Climate Resistance activists in 2017, 2019, and 2020 events. • We use entailment analysis to look at networks of motivations at each of these events. • We find stable relationships occur within and between samples supporting the notion of a 'relational culture' of motivations. • We discuss what these findings mean in terms of the literature and the future of the environmental movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]