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In the years following the 2009 recession, local governments in the US have struggled to adequately maintain and manage infrastructure projects. As a result, community organizations are using new tactics to increase social and financial support for specific projects in the hopes of capturing local government attention and motivating infrastructure project delivery. This chapter explores how one community organization initiated a consensus movement by using civic crowdfunding to mobilize resources for a specific infrastructure project. Based on a matched pairs case study with two protected bike lane (PBL) projects in Denver, CO, USA (one that used consensus movement tactics and one that did not), this analysis focuses on the emergence of a consensus movement and its implications for project stakeholders. As a consensus movement supporting infrastructure, I argue that the project-based nature is important in defining movement success. Additionally, I argue that the relationship between the social movement organization and the state is more important than a typical consensus movement because infrastructure delivery requires a high level of state coordination and resources. The implications of using a consensus movement to support a specific infrastructure project point to shifting roles between social movement organization and the state.

This article presents the results of a 15-year longitudinal study of the major educational peacebuilding initiatives in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, during times of relative peace and of acute violence (1993–2008). Using longitudinal field research data and surveys, it examines how peace initiatives, that work across conflict lines, adapt to hostile and unfavorable environments. Additionally, it investigates the criteria that allows some peacebuilding initiatives to survive and persist, when the large majority do not. Building on the organizational and social movement studies literature, I contend that organizations need to successfully attend to a variety of challenges such as maintaining resources, maintaining legitimacy, managing internal conflict, and maintaining commitment to have a significant chance for survival. Moreover, I argue that for organizations committed to working across difference and inequality in unfavorable and hostile conflict environments, it is critical for organizational effectiveness and survival to pay heed to the quality of the cross-conflict relationships, as well as, to matters of equality.

Occupy was a leaderless, resistance movement that started as Occupy Wall Street in New York City on September 17, 2011 but soon spread around the world, becoming a truly global movement. This chapter provides a detailed description and analysis of the processes of learning consensus decision-making in Occupy Dame Street in Dublin, Ireland.The analysis draws on more than five months of “militant ethnographic” and participatory action research within the Occupy movement. The chapter points to the ways in which uncertainty impacted on the processes of learning in Occupy and how it intersected with responsibility and commitment of the participants.

The purpose of this paper is to study the moving consensus of multi‐agent dynamical systems with time delays and directed weighted networks.

The approach used in the study, the topologies of multi‐agent dynamical systems with directed weighted networks is graph theories. The frequency domain is applied to research the movement characteristics of multi‐agent systems with time delays. The generalized Nyquist criterion and curvature theorem are utilized to analyze the consensus algorithm with heterogeneous input delays and heterogeneous communication delays.

It was discovered that the consensus for the delayed multi‐agent systems with asymmetric coupling weights can be achieved with the hypothesis of directed weighted network composed of n agents with a globally reachable node. The convergence condition is a decentralized consensus condition which uses only local information of each agent.

The novelty associated with this work is to present a new approach to study the consensus of delayed multi‐agent dynamical systems with directed weighted networks. The consensus condition obtained in the paper is less conservative than the consensus condition given in references.

This chapter will establish the two main strands of the study's theoretical framework. These strands represent the internal and external resources in the GSE case. The resource mobilisation (RM) strand refers to the internal resources of GSE, while the political opportunity structure (POS) refers to external resources. By referring to the literature on social movements particularly that which dwells on RM and the exploitation of political opportunities, the study will provide an understanding of collective action. This study investigates the campaign of an environmental movement that challenged the waste policy of the state, on the issue of incineration. As the state changed waste policy, the Galway campaign mobilised internal resources and exploited external political opportunities. The shifting nature of this opportunity structure may affect the patterns of internal mobilisation, utilisation of resources and types of networks a movement implements. Government responses to such challenges may also influence the patterns of collective action, as movements attempt to exploit the opportunities of the wider political environment.

The renascent focus on strategy in social movement research has made important contributions to our understanding of organizational dynamics, but has not been systematically applied to relational dynamics within movements as a whole. We begin to bridge that gap by presenting a framework for mapping the relative strategic positions of multiple collective actors along two dimensions of strategic orientation: the depth of challenge promoted and the breadth of appeal cultivated. This framework integrates a wider range of collective actors into analyses, and identifies distinct movement roles and contributions associated with different strategic positions. More importantly, the framework facilitates analysis of the overall distribution of actors across a movement and the nature and extent of linkages among them – what we refer to as strategic articulation. Drawing on a breadth of secondary research, we identify characteristics of movement distributions that facilitate stronger articulation and draw out their implications for intramovement relational dynamics – such as the balance between cooperation and competition, and the extent to which flanks are integrated or isolated.

Encourages the use of Delphi for librarians in search of a research methodology. Describes one of many applications of the method, as an example of how the method can be employed in a library‐related problem solving process. The Delphi method is an effective means of consensus building, without all the meetings. Includes a description of one such consensus building process, used at an academic library a number of years ago, to determine standardized course content for a formal course in library instruction, a component of the university's general education initiative. A 134‐item checklist of learning objectives was distributed to participants, with the aim of refining the list based on an environmental scan of faculty librarians as experts. High consensus learning objectives were included in the manual, and low consensus objectives were not used. Discusses the viability of applying the Delphi technique to library science and librarianship.