Reflections from the #BigIF

The Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign held a rally in Hyde Park this weekend. Three things stood out as major highlights for me:

1)      Wow. Getting 45,000 people to take any form of coordinated political action is an extraordinary achievement, particularly in the face of austerity, deep public scepticism about politics and an increasingly fractured media market that makes it ever harder to have a genuinely national conversation about anything. This was not a mass mobilisation on the scale of Stop the War or the Countryside Alliance but hats off – the domestic charity sector would kill for a show of strength like this.

2)      At one point during the day the MCs asked people to shout if they had been in Edinburgh for Make Poverty History and again if this was the first thing like this they’d ever done.  About half the crowd fell into the second camp, implying that IF has done a sterling job bringing in new blood to the global justice movement. If we’re able to keep a hold of them and integrate their diffuse networks into the NGO and churches infrastructure which has long been the backbone of development campaigning we will have built something truly formidable.  I spent the event in front of a lovely group in their late fifties who tutted loudly and in unison whenever one of the terrible statistics about hunger was mentioned by a speaker.  That relentless quiet crossness  is what gives me hope that we finally have a real shot of exercising political influence even without a government which has internationalism in its DNA: the tutters for justice are not going forget what they saw yesterday the next time a canvasser knocks on their door.

3)      I’ll admit to being sceptical about whether a minute’s silence at an event with a Glastonbury vibe was going to work. I was completely and utterly wrong – it was one of the most powerful political moments I’ve ever been part of. Led by the former Archbishop of Canterbury and held in memory of the millions of people who have died of hunger in a world of plenty, the silence worked precisely because the crowd could not otherwise have been further from a stiff picture of solemnity. Likewise, with one powerful exception, the footage on display was relentlessly focused on the opportunity before us, rather than the scale of the problem itself.

So three cheers for some truly heroic efforts over many months by more than 200 of Britain’s best-loved charities. The next ten days won’t be plain sailing though, so three things to watch as the next stage of the campaign unfolds:

1)      It still isn’t clear what the underlying political analysis of this campaign is. Are we trying to maximise pressure on the Prime Minister because we suspect he isn’t really that committed? Or is his personal passion to be treated in good faith but he needs our help with winning over his party and right-wing critics? Or are we not really interested in the UK at all and trying to show the other leaders that they better turn up ready to do some serious business? Or perhaps the priority is less about policy change and more about attitudinal change, using the hook of the G8 to recommence a conversation with the public about the good their aid is doing. There is an argument for each of the four (and they are not all mutually exclusive) but it isn’t clear that even the most involved member agencies would prioritise the four in the same way.

2)      Nutrition specialists were rightly pleased with Saturday’s announcement of new commitments emerging from the hunger summit while tax specialists aren’t holding their breath for a breakthrough of anything like the level of ambition that we need. Which side is going to ‘own’ the overall G8 verdict for the whole coalition? The campaign has shown remarkable message discipline so far, but the risk of fracture is always highest when the decision comes about how to price a partial victory.

3)      In the last few months the global justice sector has secured two massive victories (a global arms trade treaty and an end to secret deals through new European rules) against some of the most powerful vested interests in the world but change was delivered by coalitions more focussed on uniting the organisations they genuinely needed to win than on recruiting and retaining the widest possible group of NGOs. IF is the first time the UK development sector has come together in such numbers since Make Poverty History and the transaction costs remain as high as they ever were. It is unexpected pincer movements that make the biggest difference so we need to remember all time spent managing internal sector politics is time not spent doing creative outreach with high-impact unlikely suspects, like the vloggers Save the Children have been working hard to cultivate.

There will be plenty of time for post-mortems of the whole campaign later, but this weekend was overall a good reminder of the thing that brought most of us into campaigning in the first place: politicians have the power to change things and we have the power to make them. If you want to know more, there’s a good tick-tock of the day here.

Whatever happened to the AIDS apocalypse?

When I first started working in the AIDS movement in the mid noughties the picture was plausibly apocalyptic, but on World AIDS Day 2012 we are celebrating that an AIDS-free generation is now within our grasp. So what happened?

The acceleration of the science is one huge part of the story, but the effectiveness of the AIDS movement is at least as important and future campaigners can learn a lot from one of the most successful global mobilisations of the last few decades. For me four main lessons stand out:

1)      It starts with rights. Determining when to claim partial victory is the sort of thing that keeps movement leaders up at night. Overstate it and you lose the incentive for supporters to act, understate it and you lose the incentive for policy-makers to act. The moral and strategic tensions are captured in a (no doubt apocryphal) story told about a dispute inside the debt movement where one staffer accused another of being ‘the kind of person that during abolitionism would have been lobbying for more comfortable boats’. AIDS activism has successfully defined those tensions away by being more of a human rights movement than a development one. With early roots in gay liberation politics, the movement has always focused on those whose needs are greatest, not those whose stories are easiest to sell. It takes real courage to advocate for heroin addicts and sex workers at the same time as orphans and infected newborns, but unflinching honesty about the true nature of the epidemic has been, in the end, one of the movement’s great strengths.

2)      Injustice speaks for itself.  From the UK’s Terrence Higgins Trust to South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, the highest impact organisations have not been founded in solidarity by the charitable but in fury by the affected. I have written before about the importance of advocacy’s amateurs and for me the history of AIDS is the clearest example of why the advocacy ‘professionals’ should get out of the way and let the people who need to know ask the powerful how much they think their lives are worth.

3)      Institutions matter. The Global Fund, for all its faults, is multilateralism’s great success story. Its record is a triumph of institutional design, the result of a very special chemistry between the public, private and third sectors and people affected by the three diseases. While some education advocates have already started pushing for a replica for education, there is no other institution quite like the Global Fund, and no particularly good reason for that to be the case. The case for reform of global governance is painfully familiar to Global Dashboard readers, but we should try to learn at least as much from what we’ve got right as what we’ve got wrong.

4)      It takes coalitions of the willing. It bears constant repetition that the man behind the world’s first government anti-AIDS campaign was a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. Likewise, while the global AIDS fight is now one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus in the United States, it was a Republican rather than Democrat incumbent of the White House who first initiated a scaled emergency response and a distinguished veteran of George Bush’s PEPFAR who will now be leading global efforts at the new chief of the Global Fund.

We still have a long way to go but at a time when so many promises are being broken, tomorrow provides a good chance to remember that, just sometimes, campaigning works and the results can be spectacular when it does.

 

In praise of advocacy’s amateurs

In light of the great news that Oxfam are shifting to “focus more on national level change and relatively less on often-fruitless global summitry”, I’ve been thinking a bit about potent national campaigns like those started by David Kato in Uganda and Zackie Achmat in South Africa.

In both cases their activism was a response to a lived imperative, not a priority sifted from a list during a strategic planning process. It led to campaigns which were creative, insistent and bold, because failure meant dire personal consequences unthinkable to those of us in the North whose biggest worries are restless trustees and falling donations.

Their movements got momentum, in part, because the political could not have been more personal. That entanglement between the story and the strategy also seems to be one of the drivers of the huge growth of Change.org: it is hard to imagine, for example, 2 million signatures on a petition started by anybody other than Trayvon Martin’s parents.

Likewise, last week’s news in Britain was dominated by the damning findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel which uncovered what the Telegraph, reporting the Prime Minister’s moving Commons Statement, called “a campaign to smear the dead”. In the face of those slurs, victims’ families have waged a 23 year campaign of their own, in the process taking on one of the most powerful newspapers in the country and a police force engaged in what the Guardian called a conspiracy mounted “with the connivance of several pillars of (the) establishment”.

Faced with those odds, how many big brand charities or public affairs firms would have taken on the fight, far less kept it up for nearly quarter of a century? And would any of the advocacy “professionals” we know have been as courageous or effective as this extraordinary group made up of the affected, the angry and the amateur?  It has all got me thinking that maybe subsidiarity in an NGO context could mean not just devolving campaigning power to the right countries, but further down to the right people too.