Outspent and Outsmarted: Why Climate Advocacy is Failing
In April 2017, Greenpeace activists gatecrashed a shareholder meeting of Credit Suisse, one of the world’s largest banks. Lowering from the ceiling of a concert hall in Zurich, the activists unfurled a banner criticizing the bank’s involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline. Tidjane Thiam, the bank’s CEO, was in the middle of giving a speech. Untroubled by the disturbance, he acknowledged the intruders’ freedom of expression and simply carried on. So the activists packed up and left. Two years later, the bank is still involved in the pipeline project.
Disturbing meetings of people in power — a company’s general assembly, a summit of the G20, or a debate in a national parliament — is a type of activism that forms part of the standard repertoire of environmental advocacy. Advocacy is a catch-all term for any activity that argues for a cause or idea. Over the past 50 years, civil society actors found success in advocating for environmental causes, with organizations such as WWF and Greenpeace scoring impressive victories on deforestation, nuclear testing, whaling, conservation, and toxic chemicals.
However, climate change is proving to be a tougher nut to crack for environmental advocates. Nearly 40 years after global warming first entered the political agenda and 27 years after the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the world has yet to get serious about preserving human civilization as we know it. This is also the result of the ineffectiveness of climate advocacy. In the climate policy debates held in multilateral and national political arenas, climate advocates are outspent and outsmarted by their opponents — powerful lobbying organizations defending entrenched economic interests and demagogic individuals pursuing perverse ideologies.
If we want to avoid the most perilous consequences of a warming planet, climate advocacy needs to up its game. We need new strategies and tactics, and we need them now.
Politics is the process of negotiating competing interests in a diverse society. In the political haggle over our atmosphere, the negotiation table is usually set with corporations and lobbying groups on one side and civil society actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), activists, and journalists on the other. The track record of civil society actors in these negotiations is dismal, strewn with unheard pleas, unheeded proposals, and botched leadership. Climate advocates may win the occasional battle, but they are losing the war. Some pundits even go so far as to blame environmental NGOs for much of the world’s climate inaction and wonder whether civil society actors are still fit for the purpose of advocacy and campaigning.
Non-state actors achieved remarkable success in influencing the outcome of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol after 1997. These early victories suggested that non-state actors may be as effective in their advocacy for our climate as they had been on other environmental issues. In the 2000s, in the spirit of don’t fix what’s not broken, NGOs continued to rely on traditional advocacy tools such as lobbying legislators, publishing reports, taking legal action, sending letters, and coordinating petitions, marches, and consumer boycotts. Progress was slow, but climate advocates remained hopeful that the Kyoto Protocol and its soon-to-be-negotiated successor would put the world on track for avoiding dangerous climate change. The turning point came in 2009, when President Obama failed to win congressional approval for a cap-and-trade bill, and COP15 in Copenhagen ended in the debacle that is the Copenhagen Accord. In both cases, scholars and journalists blamed civil society actors for a range of mistakes such as misreading the political zeitgeist, failing to show unity and speak with one voice, and missing the importance of mobilizing the masses.
In the wake of these defeats and criticisms, civil society actors underwent a period of self-reflection and started to adopt a set of new strategies. Environmental NGOs made efforts to decrease the fragmentation in their own ranks, develop common policy goals, and re-engage the masses through grassroots movements. Academics and journalists repositioned the way they framed and reported about climate change. Pro-climate businesses reorganized to build strength through unity. These investments paid dividends six years later in the form of the Paris Agreement, which — despite its many shortcomings — is widely seen as a historic achievement.
But the enthusiasm and hope generated by the outcomes of COP21 in Paris have since dissipated. Climate advocacy isn’t working as well as it needs to be. As the current emission reduction pledges of signatory countries put us on a pathway to three degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels, we must ask the question: Why is civil society failing to persuade political and corporate decision-makers to get serious about what the World Economic Forum recently called the risk of greatest concern to all of humanity?
The search for an answer leads us to the concept of competitiveness. If negotiation is a competition of arguments, climate advocates haven’t been very competitive so far. Overturning entrenched interests might be harder than safeguarding them, but that’s the rule rather than the exception in social revolutions. It’s what civil society actors are supposed to be good at. When it comes to climate change, they don’t seem to be.
Jude Howell, director of the Non-Governmental Public Action Research Programme at the London School of Economics, thinks that many civil society actors, especially environmental NGOs, have become more institutionalized in recent times. Whereas NGOs used to be rebels, relishing in picking battles with the political establishment to challenge the status quo, today’s NGOs are more bureaucratic, work more closely with governments, and depend on public funding to a larger degree. As a result, Howell argues, they are less autonomous, less likely to take adversarial political positions, and more prone to self-censorship. The same logic applies to the corporate realm, where strategic collaborations between corporations and NGOs are increasingly popular. As long as 95% of NGOs are in such partnerships to raise money and 88% of corporates to boost their reputation — as a recent poll suggests — conflicts of interest are unavoidable.
More problems have emerged from recent political and cultural macrotrends that have changed the context in which climate advocacy takes place. Digitization and social networking are causing information overload and shrinking attention spans. It has never been easier to send a message and never harder to be heard. Scientific reports or press releases could have been news in the past, but making headlines today requires the social media potency of a Greta Thunberg or the civil disobedience of mass movements such as Extinction Rebellion. But these exceptions cannot hide the fact that civil society actors struggle to elevate their signals above the noise. This effect is compounded by a phenomenon known as apocalypse fatigue — after hearing about the perils of climate change for forty years, many people have tired of the topic. The warnings and pleas continually broadcast by journalists and academics on all available channels increasingly fall on deaf ears or, worse, spark accusations of alarmism.
Perhaps more importantly, today’s political zeitgeist discredits a set of values at the heart of the civic system. Evidence, objectivity, discourse, truth — paradigms we used to take for granted — have been diluted with the arrival of fake news and alternative facts, yet civic arguing is still founded on them. Instead of persuading people to change their views, presenting arguments steeped in reason and scientific facts can now entrench anti-climate opinions even further and thus become counter-productive.
Another hallmark of today’s political culture is that climate change is a matter of ideology, much more so than other environmental topics. It’s so polarizing that it draws the boundaries that define political factions. In a perplexing twist sometime in the 1990s, conservatives crossed environmental conservation off their political agenda. And when conservative populism started to enjoy broad voter support after the global financial crisis ten years ago, climate change became a victim of the party over policy dogma.
These developments have eroded the effectiveness of the standard advocacy repertoire. In the era of Netflix and YouTube, who has the time and patience to read a scientific report? For how long can the Thunberg-inspired School Strike for Climate entertain the masses when the next adrenaline-releasing sensation is just a Twitter feed refresh away? And with psychographic manipulation and surveillance capitalism chipping away at the foundations of our democracy, who still trusts organizations pretending to be the good guys?
Meanwhile, corporations have an easy time swaying public opinion and buying climate change legislation by spending vast amounts of money on conducting PR campaigns, funding think tanks, mobilizing grassroots movements, drafting legislation, and providing financial support to the campaigns of politicians who side with their interests. These approaches may not differ much from the traditional toolbox used by civil society actors, but corporations are deploying them with much greater savvy and ruthlessness. They excel at spreading misinformation, distracting from the issue, and confusing the public. In contrast, climate advocates have so far been unable to upgrade their toolbox to fit the new realities of a digitized, socially networked, populist, and distracted world. They are being outspent and outsmarted by their anti-climate opponents.
As unfortunate as these developments may be for climate advocacy, surrendering to them cannot be an option. Donella Meadows, a scholarly pioneer in systems thinking, identifies the rules and goals set by policy as some of the most potent leverage points for driving systems change. Defeat on the policy battlefield would be catastrophic.
The next seven years will be particularly decisive. Under the Paris Agreement’s ratchet mechanism, signatory countries will update their emissions reduction pledges in 2020 and again in 2025 and 2030, each time following a global stocktake. Concurrently, governments will design and adopt national and sub-national legislation that provides the necessary domestic conditions to meet their international pledges. The world will be in a policy-making flurry for many years to come, and we need strong civil society actors to ensure that decision-makers show the right level of ambition and vigor and that corporate interest groups don’t undermine the effort.
So how do we make climate advocacy more competitive? By developing new strategies and tactics.
Strategies are high-level choices about resources and approaches for achieving long-term objectives. In climate politics, strategies are important to build the values, norms, networks, and resources required to fight a prolonged political battle. Tactics are the specific steps or actions taken to implement a strategy. Tactics matter because policy decisions are made at a specific point in time, often influenced by what the state of fleeting elements — political mood, public opinion, or the health of the economy — is right at game time. It was no coincidence that the largest ever climate march took place in September 2014 in New York City, the same city that hosted critically important climate talks a few days later, or that Pope Francis published his climate encyclical Laudato si’ shortly before the Paris climate summit in 2015. Both interventions succeeded because they happened in the right places at the right times.
Whatever new strategy and tactics climate advocates come up with, they must target three domains of society. The first and most obvious domain is government. We need to engage politicians and civil servants on all governance levels (multinational, national, and sub-national) and in all three branches (executive, legislative, judiciary). The second domain is business. Some companies are now bigger than entire countries when measured by wealth or employment, and they wield such power that they have become a separate layer of governance superimposed on traditional structures. The policies these corporations set in terms of what they sell and from whom they buy can have massive impacts on social systems. The third domain is citizenry, the people who elect politicians and buy from corporations. Citizens can influence policy-making directly through their voting behavior and the use of direct democracy tools. They also have indirect power through the opinions they voice and the pressure they put on politicians.
Within these domains, climate advocacy needs to provide solutions for a set of intricate problems. The efficiency problem is about overcoming the imbalance in financial resources of the two sides of the political debate. Between 2000 and 2016, corporations outspent environmental NGOs by a factor of ten. If climate advocates can’t level the financial playing field, they must find ways to get more bang for the buck through creativity and ingenuity or by leveraging their good guys brand.
The attention problem is about ensuring that climate change stays high on the agenda of political and corporate decision-makers. This is a particular challenge in the periods between high-level international climate events when the spotlight has moved on to other concerns.
The conversion problem is about translating people’s long-term concerns to short-term willingness to act. Recent polling shows that most people are concerned about climate change but show little willingness to change how they vote, how they act, and how much they are willing to pay to address the problem. Likewise, there are many businesses publicly supporting climate action but not prioritizing the issue on their lobbying agendas. Climate advocates must find ways to convert concern into action.
Finally, climate advocates need to correct for the representation problem that exists in those jurisdictions where policy-makers don’t act despite having a mandate. In the United States, for instance, a record number of citizens are now concerned about climate change, but their government keeps rolling back environmental legislation and expanding drilling rights to oil companies. In Europe, 74% of citizens consider climate change a very serious problem and want the EU and national governments to take action. The representation problem also exists in the business world, where investors, employees, and consumers think corporations don’t act fast enough on climate.
When the stakes are high, preserving the status quo is easier than instigating change. So developing new strategies and tactics that can outcompete those of anti-climate corporations and ideologues will not be trivial. The good news is that we live in an age of disruption. Start-ups are challenging complacent corporations with better products, business models, and marketing campaigns. Social businesses are re-imagining supply chains, public-private partnerships, and value distribution models. Thought leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rutger Bregman, and Mariana Mazzucato provide compelling alternatives to outdated political and economic frameworks. These imaginative and courageous entrepreneurs find success in challenging existing power structures in business, politics, and society. They thrive because they use innovative strategies adapted to the current zeitgeist, leveraging technology, networks, and innovative methodologies.
Civil society actors should borrow from these approaches to upgrade their advocacy toolbox, adopting a mindset of advocacy entrepreneurship characterized by innovation, experimentation, and iteration. We need fresh approaches to corporate activism, citizen engagement, and mass mobilization, and new forms of social media messaging and storytelling. We need more effective benchmarking strategies and more innovative legal actions. We need unlikely alliances and unusual collaborations, matching scientists with artists and lawyers with designers. We need to disrupt the paradigms and mechanisms at the heart of our policy system through smart governance reform and sophisticated electoral campaigns.
There is growing momentum for climate action, and some have set out to capitalize on it. The Climate Advocacy Lab provides a platform to share tools and tactics for engaging Americans on climate change. The Good Lobby empowers citizens to use the channels of participatory democracy at both national and EU level. What we miss are advocacy entrepreneurs who innovate and experiment and the mechanisms to understand what works and how we can bring the most promising interventions to other topical and geographic contexts.
It’s time for advocacy entrepreneurship. It’s time to smarten up.
