Duncan Green expands on some of the conversations in the Q&A after his IGDC Annual Lecture
Co-option
Most influencing strategies combine a bit of Insider and a bit of Outsider. Insider approaches work through building relationships with those in power, either decision makers or those that can influence them. Outsider approaches range from street protest to the softer end, such as media work where you get stories in the public domain and use them to put pressure on your influencing target.
The problem arises because the kinds of activists who do those two things tend to be different, and relations between them can be very fraught. There’s an asymmetry between Insiders and Outsiders.
Typically, the Outsiders get a bit cross with the Insiders because they think the Insiders are being co-opted – they’re compromising, watering down the activists’ positions and confusing everything. But that’s how agreements that end a conflict usually work – there’s some kind of compromise.
In contrast, the Insiders, if they’re smart, are delighted to have people chucking (hopefully metaphorical) rocks in the street because that increases pressure on decision makers and improves their chances of getting a result.
Those tensions often hit a peak at the moment of victory, which is when a lot of movements fall apart. There was a global movement at the end of the 90s/early noughties called Jubilee 2000, an extraordinary campaign that took an obscure biblical text saying that you should periodically forgive debt and managed to turn it into a global push to write off debts for the poorest countries.
In the end, they got a really good deal, which wrote off billions of dollars in the debts of low-income countries. But at the very moment when that was being signed in the corridors of power, the Jubilee movement fell apart in a castle in Germany, because the radical Outsider element said ‘you’ve betrayed us; you’ve accepted half measures’, while the Insiders said ‘you people know nothing – we’re in the room and this is as good as we are going to get.’ And the fact that the radicals were from the Global South and the soft insiders were all from the Global North just made matters worse.
The way you avoid these kinds of splits is through having some level of internal accountability and democracy, but that requires political maturity and a huge investment of time and effort to keep everyone onside.
Burnout
Burnout is another significant problem among activists. There’s a model of activism that sees it as a personal expression of rejection or outrage at injustice in the world. And you can never do enough to express that – you must always work harder, collect more signatures, give more talks. Any attempt to do things like have fun is a betrayal of that noble cause – there’s a fantastic book about the UK Labour Party in the 1980s where somehow smiling or eating vegetables came to be seen as right wing.
That kind of ‘hairshirtism’ in activism is painful to watch, partly because people burn out. You’ve got to pace yourself: activism is not just a thing you do while you’re young and don’t have kids, before going on to get a ‘proper job’.
How to work in complexity
Turning now to the focus of activism, we come to the challenge of understanding what it is we are trying to fix. Most advocacy starts with a problem: climate change risks, violations of rights, absent or inadequate public services—the list of things we want to fix is endless. The trick is not to jump straight to our preferred solution, but to spend time unpacking the problem—there is even an apocryphal (sadly) quote attributed to Einstein: ‘If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it’. How I wish he’d actually said it!
There are several ways to unpack problems, which all basically do the same thing—start to unpick the many contributory factors in order to identify some promising ‘points of entry’ for influencing. In the middle of Covid, in 2022, participants in one of our aid leader influencing courses gave up their lunch hour to construct an Ishikawa or ‘fishbone’ diagram’ around a problem they were all facing—vaccine hesitancy among the populations they were working with, mainly in East Africa. Here’s what they came up with:
They identified broad categories of causes (in the boxes at the end of the larger bones), and within those, sub-causes. They then looked for suitable points of entry based on some criteria: Is it important for your goal (in this case reducing vaccine hesitancy)? Does it look winnable? Do you or your organization have credibility/leverage on this issue? Are other organizations or already doing it?
This kind of starting point allows you to wrestle some sense out of a complex problem such as the reluctance to get vaccinated, without oversimplifying the causes. It uncovers some entry points you may not have thought of (if pharmacies are spreading rumours because they are annoyed about being cut out of the business, let’s get them involved). Finally, if, as often happens, your first efforts fail, it is easy to go back to the fishbone in search of other points of entry that might stand a better chance of success.
The next step is to think about that clunky word, the ‘stakeholders’. Who makes the decisions you are trying to influence around your point of entry? Who might want to block them? Who are the ‘influentials’ who can sway both decision makers and blockers?
Invest time in understanding the stakeholders, then map them on a simple 2×2, where the two axes represent level of influence and level of support for the thing you are advocating for. Here’s an example from one of my LSE students on getting free menstrual products in Malawi’s schools:
In this case, the goal is changing formal rules (laws, policies, spending commitments), but mapping stakeholders is equally helpful when addressing norm shifts; it’s just the players that are different.
Once you’ve identified the broad stakeholders, keep digging. Take the Malawian Ministry of Health – who is more important in getting rid of the tax on menstrual products? The Minister? The Permanent Secretary? A more junior civil servant? Is there a parliamentary health committee that can apply pressure?
Next, put yourself in their shoes: what might persuade them to support your campaign? Conversations with those affected? A piece of well-communicated research? The right messenger—someone they fear or respect? Or is it better to wait for a ‘critical juncture’—a moment when change becomes more possible, such as an election, or a crisis? Some influences are more below the radar: is your issue part of a historical legacy? How does it resonate with prevailing ideologies, religion, culture, and values?
Then (and only then) is it time to move on from analysing the problem and the system to ‘so what do we do?’, a combination of overall aims (strategies) and specific actions (tactics). The key point here is that the strategy and tactics need to reflect your understanding of the problem and the stakeholder mapping. If you just default to the kind of activism you always do, you’ve just wasted a lot of time doing the fishbones, etc.!