The impact of the summer 2007 forest fires in Greece: Recent environmental mobilizations, cyber-activism and electoral performance

This report circumambulates around the environmental issue, examining mobilizations in favour of public access to the seafront and protest events against the recent devastating forest fires. By framing this discussion within existing scholarly contributions on related dimensions of the environmental issue (environmental consciousness, grassroots environmental contestation) in Southern Europe in general and Greece in particular, it suggests that the environmental mobilization dynamic in Greece has been infused with a new, global, mobilizing resource that offers new avenues to evaluate the potency of Greek civil society. Finally, the article discusses the results of the 2007 national elections and ponders the chances of political ecology becoming a permanent feature of Greek parliamentary politics.

Square PoliticsKey characteristics of the indignant mobilizations in Greece.

This paper discusses the findings from an online survey completed by nearly 500 persons claiming participation in the indignant (Aganaktismenoi) mobilizations of Syntagma square in Athens during May/June 2011. The demographics of the respondents could have been highly affected by the research medium that was used. However, this paper argues that since the indignant mobilizations were called across different nations by using online social networks, like facebook, the characteristics identified in the Greek case perfectly fit within the general pattern that characterised the participants in these mobilizations. As such, this paper puts the mobilizations at Syntagma square in a good footing for comparative cross-national examination. Furthermore, this paper confirms the increasingly important role played by cyber activism over socio-political contestation in the Greek context. In addition, it discusses the impact that this cyber activism has on the gender composition of political activism and the role of mainstream political participation.

The link between the learning organisation and curriculum innovation:A comparative study of public and private primary schools in Greece

This article examines the relationship between the learning organisation and the implementation of curriculum innovation within schools. It also compares the extent of innovative activity undertaken by schools in the public and the private sectors. A learning organisation is characterised by long-term goals, participatory decision-making processes, collaboration with external stakeholders, effective mechanisms for the internal communication of knowledge and information, and the use of rewards for its members. These characteristics are expected to promote curriculum innovation, once a number of control factors have been taken into account. The article reports on a study carried out in 197 Greek public and private primary schools in the 1999-2000 school year. Structured interviews with school principals were used as a method of data collection. According to the statistical results, the most important determinants of the innovative activity of a school are the extent of its collaboration with other organisations (i.e. openness to society), and the implementation of development programmes for teachers and parents (i.e. communication of knowledge and information). Contrary to expectations, the existence of long-term goals, the extent of shared decision-making, and the use of teacher rewards had no impact on curriculum innovation. The study also suggests that the private sector, as such, has an additional positive effect on the implementation of curriculum innovation, once a number of human, financial, material, and management resources have been controlled for. The study concludes by making recommendations for future research that would shed more light on unexpected outcomes and would help explore the causal link between variables in the research model.

The class impact of post disaster restoration policies: The example of Ilia, Greece and the need for a politics of disaster

This article presents research findings from selected rural communities that were struck in 2007 by one of the largest fires in history in Greece. The restoration policies implemented resulted in a class-differentiated recovery process. The article examines this development in the context of neoliberal policies and argues that political context should be a locus of intervention.