Repertoires of Action and Control of Protest by the Climate Justice Movement in Spain (2019–2025)

This paper presents the continuation of a previous investigation into climate mobilization in Spain, extending the time period covered to 2019–2025, incorporating new databases and including protest control analysis. The aim is to analyze diachronically the repertoires of action used in order to understand their evolution, intensity, participating organizations and how social control of protest influences them. Through documentary compilation and systematic coding of protest events (N = 1502) and the analysis of social control over protest, through reports on repression of social movements and data on human rights violations in the context of protest, the main findings can be highlighted as follows: disruption increased after the pandemic, in 2021; from 2023 onwards, there is a shift in trend towards a decrease in confrontational mobilization and an increase in contained forms, with collective action evolving towards a diversity and complementarity of noninstitutional and nonviolent strategies and tactics, forging alliances with other movements to maintain the social base and support. This shift is temporally associated with an intensification of protest control and criminalization. Moreover, a significant presence of either pre-existing or newly formed organizations is maintained, with a relationship existing between the variation in collective protagonism and the typology–intensity of repertoires. Thus, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the aim is to contribute to the international debate on the tactics of social movements, with the most important contribution being the integration of repertoire analysis with the study of protest control in that movement.