Internal crises within social movements often generate a strange fascination. From the outside, they tend to be interpreted in simplistic and biased ways.
And some even interpret them—conveniently—as definitive proof of their incoherence; from within, they are often experienced as a dispute between incompatible narratives and approaches.
But transformative organizations rarely enter into crisis for a single reason.
And when we try to explain them in terms of good guys and bad guys and opposing sides, we almost always fail to understand what is really happening. A great deal of honesty is needed to address the issue in all its diversity, complexity, and depth.
In recent weeks, the crisis at GOB Mallorca has triggered a flood of commentary, speculation, and stances.
The resignation of ten women, members of the board of directors who had promoted an ecofeminist candidacy in 2023, has brought to the surface disagreements about governance, workplace health, understandings of leadership, and organizational models. To understand this, a broader and deeper analysis is needed to examine what this conflict tells us about the challenges facing environmental organizations and many other social movements today.
Environmentalism is experiencing a paradoxical moment. Never before have the relevance, urgency, and necessity of its denunciations been so evident—the monster grows ever larger, with more tentacles, refining its narrative and strategies, and accelerating devastation, overwhelming the actual capacity of social movements to influence the issue—nor has the need for its proposals been so urgent.
The climate crisis, biodiversity loss, over-tourism, and resource depletion, along with their vital ecological, environmental, and social justice consequences, provide increasing justification for decades of environmental struggles and lead us to the need to join forces from the grassroots level and converge with labor movements, the fight for public services, the feminist struggle, the anti-racist struggle, the anti-fascist struggle, peace movements, and others, in order to drive the eco-social transformations we desire.
It is a confluence toward which all transformative social movements tend, and proof of this lies in initiatives such as Earth Uprisings, the State Social Forum working for the Ecosocial Pact 'Beyond Growth,' the meetings of international networks against overtourism, and references to anti-capitalist summer universities, to which the GOB has also been involved. This includes internal conflicts (within leading environmental organizations such as Ecologists in Action and Greenpeace). We are no longer just in time to resist, but to go on the offensive and advance as a lever for change, and for this we need a broad and cohesive social base that works side by side with a common and cross-cutting objective: everywhere. And yet, and perhaps precisely for this reason, the movements that drive them, especially those with years of experience, as is the case with the GOB, experience tensions, attrition, and difficulties in sustaining themselves.
It is not just a confrontation between conservationists and those who defend social ecology (no one questions the defense of the land and biodiversity, as the axes on which everything revolves). The environmental movement (because without the land and its resources, life is impossible).
This isn't just a matter of conflicting generational visions, of nostalgics versus young, critical perspectives, of reformers versus revolutionaries. Nor is it simply a clash of governance models between those who seek to incorporate the values of change and transformation that we would like to promote both within and outside our organizations, and those who prefer a directive organizational model measured in terms of performance indicators.
It's not just a matter stemming from the discomfort generated by feminist critical examinations of the structures, values, hierarchies, and objectives of the very entities that should be levers and tools for social transformation, and the furious reactions this provokes. It's not just any of these issues in isolation. It's all of them together, simultaneously, and amplified by the urgent need to reach agreements in a world where the margins for the real changes we so desperately need seem increasingly narrow.
The challenge for social movements in general, and the GOB in particular, lies precisely in their capacity, or lack thereof, to incorporate all this complexity and dimension into their strategic reflections, so that they can become something useful to the society of these islands in the present and future scenarios we will face, marked by ecosocial crisis and uncertainty.
Today, we need all organizational structures, and even more so, established and reputable entities like the GOB—despite certain mantras that are repeated until they become accepted truths (that mobilization capacity has been lost, that street presence has diminished, that things aren't done as they used to be), even though large mobilizations have been promoted, new fronts of struggle have been opened, and the capacity for social and political influence has been expanded—to be the cornerstones of the biodiversity that sustains us as yet another tool for social justice, democracy, and collective action.
I believe this is a truly necessary reflection at a time when it is tempting to interpret any internal conflict as a demonstration of failure on one side and victory on the other, and to kick the can down the road without incorporating any element of critical review that conflicts compel us to undertake.
And the goal is to move forward as a collective and as a society. If we don't, we won't be facing progress, but rather a major setback that we will ultimately regret.
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