Global-Local Internet Activism in Brazil: Campaigns, Online Petitions and Action Organization As a Borderline Movement

This paper exams the relation between the local, national and global sphere relations within the communication process occurring within Avaaz, a global platform for online petitions, with respect to Amazon deforestation and public policy definition in Brazil, such as Forest code, among others trend environmental topics. Avaaz (meaning "voice" in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages) is a website platform started in 2007 with the purpose to operate globally from its office located in the US and it´s 16 language platform content customization, it has acquired millions of members spread in 194 countries, even if it do not have local formal representations in them. From its launch to nowadays the online platform has been able to implement a series of actions from campaigns and alerts to online petitions and organization of protests and events around the world, in their words, it is “a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere”. By examining this case, we intend to discuss this new form of appropriation of the political and collective action and its implications for the communication and awareness of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the mobilization of topics related to the environmental agenda are confronted with the theoretical perspective of the globalization critics developed by the Latin American authors such as Escobar, Quijano, Mignolo, that propose a kind of politics of place that could be regarded as a sociotechnics frontier movement, in which local movements are linked to continental or global movements, composing transnational networks movements (meshworks) for democracy.