Effective environmental advocacy

Abstract

As sea levels rise and pollution spreads, people around the world are organizing to advocate for a better environment. Which advocacy strategies are the most successful in persuading citizens, governments, and businesses to change their behaviour in pro-environmental ways? Based on two original datasets of environmental organizations and their actions and more than a decade of fieldwork, this talk will argue that a relatively small set of advocacy strategies are particularly effective in communities around the world: make friends on the inside, make it work locally, make it work for business, educate, and engage the heart (through art). Confrontational advocacy strategies such as protests and lawsuits that gain a lot of coverage in the popular press and by scholars tend to be less reliably effective, although they can occasionally generate dramatic change. Perhaps surprisingly, these five advocacy strategies are effective everywhere, in all types of regimes and in every region of the world. The presentation will begin by giving an overview of the cross national evidence about different advocacy strategies. It will then focus on one strategy in particular—make it work locally. Using four specific examples from East Asia, it will show how local, community based advocacy efforts can scale their success to the regional, national, an even international level through institutionalization, incremental innovation, seizing political opportunities, and trans-national networking. The presentation will end with a call to participants in the room to think about how they can utilize these proven strategies to promote better environmental outcomes in their own communities and countries.

Author(s): Mary Alice Haddad

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