A cursory look at the ways that environmental activists seek to shape a growing global environmental agenda reveals a wide range of tactics that do not conform to traditional definitions of institutional versus disruptive politics. Zald and Diani argued in a recent Mobilization forum that our understandings of elite-movement relationships need revision to account for the variety of ways that movement actors relate to economic and political decision makers. While political opportunity analysts have shown that the presence or absence of sympathetic elites has important implications for movement outcomes, this article provides evidence about how the relationships between movement organizations and sympathetic transnational elites affect relationships within movements. By incorporating concepts and techniques from social network analysis, I derive a model to assess the effect of elite alliances on the structural positions in the network of environmental transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). Findings indicate that elite alliances affect TSMO network positions differently, depending on the type and number of relationships the TSMO has with elites.

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