I’m currently in the Operations team at Ambitious Impact, with a broader trajectory in animal advocacy. Previously I spent 5 years in operational, community organising and leadership roles at Animal Think Tank, and served in the initial launch team of Animal Rising. Before joining the animal movement in a paid capacity, I organised protests, social events and conferences in Melbourne, Australia.
Dilan Fernando
Karma: 160
Animal advocates should be cautious of cost-effectiveness
I think this post is spot on.
I’ll throw another two reasons into the mix—and to be clear, I’m referring here to why we have a dearth of people who gather for in-person activism, as I think in-person activity is disproportionately more important for building a connected and powerful movement:The current aesthetic of most activism is overly tailored for hardcore people. A lot of what we ask people to do—protests and street outreach—is stuff that most people find scary. The vibe is often black t-shirts and placards. I’m all for catering to the rebels, but I think there are a lot of more moderate vegans and veggies who could be activated by offering them a different menu of actions within a more “normal” container. I think political organising has a lot of potential here—some good examples I’ve experienced recently were a letter-writing + pizza event organised by UK Voters for Animals, and also an outing where I helped Direct Action Everywhere gather signatures for a ballot measure. These were meaningful actions where I enjoyed connecting with others, but they were also aesthetically much more enjoyable than most protests and outreach events I’ve organised and participated in. In addition to political organising, I think organising people for institutional change is another huge area of potential—e.g. mobilising people to lobby local cafes to make their milk plant-based by default, or organising workers in large companies to create vegan food clubs in their offices. Plant-Based Universities is a great example of institution-focused organising.
Much of the movement doesn’t place a high value on activating people. I was recently on a call with someone who’s been deeply active in the movement 20+ years and they mentioned an interesting phenomenon: that a lot of groups started out very grassroots with a strong focus on organising people—but then as they grew and professionalised, they focused more on work carried out by their staff, and lost sight of organising volunteers. Professionalised staff can often achieve more in the short term on specific campaigns, but by choosing not to organise volunteers, there’s a trade-off. Here’s the thing: I think it’s very easy to see organising as simply a means to an end—as a tool to achieve a campaign win. But I think actually, activating people is an end in and of itself, because it builds movement capacity. A broad base of distributed, engaged people is what allows a movement to respond rapidly, weather setbacks, and build lasting power. I would love to see more organisations designing their campaigns such that organising volunteers is placed at the centre, not just as an optional add-on. This would have the added benefit of creating a greater range of approaches which can appeal to different types of people, because every organisation will have its own flavour—which would help with the “aesthetic” problem I mention above.
This is a really inspiring post Sofia, thank you for writing it! I find this concept of a movement role, distinct from one’s job role, quite liberating in a way, as it allows us to shape our contribution beyond the constraints of the job market.
My impression is that most funders are already doing the above (we are too).
That’s interesting, James, and an update for me—if you happen to have any top sources at hand that point to how different funders are thinking, that would be really useful.I don’t think the above is that promising as I think there is not a predetermined set of milestones that lead to victory..
I 100% agree that there’s no predetermined set of milestones, and that any long-term strategising we do needs to be robust to an ever-changing world. To clarify, my suggestion to fund researchers is not intended to suggest those researchers should direct the movement from the top-down, as that majorly risks locking us in to suboptimal paths—but that they can surface possibilities that the rest of us might be missing, and provide information to help the rest of the ecosystem make better decisions. The value isn’t in creating a rigid roadmap, but in helping the movement have a clearer shared understanding of what we’re building toward and what capacities we might need—and in updating that understanding as the world changes. This is my understanding of the value provided by think tanks in other movements, and strategy personnel in large corporations who engage in vision-setting, scenario-planning and the like.
More broadly, what I’m pointing towards is what I think of as the movement’s ‘strategy function’ - the capacity to step back, look at the whole system, and help different actors coordinate toward shared goals. I’m curious whether you think the movement currently has sufficient capacity in this area, even if you think dedicated researchers aren’t the right form for it?I also think that when this has been attempted, basically nothing useful was generated so it was actually quite a poor use of movement resources.
In this realm I’m only really aware of Animal Think Tank’s long-term strategy project and some work at Rethink Priorities that never quite took off. Do you have others in mind? From my own awareness, (a) we’ve dedicated very little movement resource to this kind of work; and (b) I would really hesitate to rule out an entire area of work just because a couple of projects have not delivered, as there are all sorts of reasons that can happen.
Thanks for all these thoughts Ben. A few scattered thoughts in response:
I don’t have a view on your third challenge, but it’s a good point.
Regarding your first two challenges: I agree with you, Thom and James on all of these. Reflecting on my intent in outlining short-term pragmatism, I think I ultimately wanted not to critique individual organisations or people, but the movement-wide dynamic/mindset that seems to have arisen. I.e...
While many orgs have a clear ToC, there don’t seem to be many spaces where movement-wide theory of victory gets discussed/debated/refined—at least not spaces that influence actual important decisions (well, not that I’m aware of… it may well be I’m just completely unaware of “the rooms where it happens”).
While many orgs/people want a diversity of tactics, I have a soft sense that our funding priorities could reflect this better. Given the young and clueless nature of our movement, I think we should be funding a very diverse spread of interventions, and more highly valuing interventions that build power.
100% agree with your thoughts about evaluating both validity and likelihood of milestones. I really struggle to see how we can be an effective movement without at least investing a small amount of resource into this.
Appreciate you flagging the point about “theory of failure” mapping, that’s a useful update for me!
Thank you for the link to Milan’s post about doing good while clueless! I think “steering capacity” is a great concept and very relevant here, and I like how it’s broken down—that could be a really useful tool for people wanting to take a “visionary pragmatist” approach going forward.
Hi Josh, here are a few rough ideas of how the post’s ideas could be applied to the pro-animal world today:
Applying quality 3 (theory of victory):
Fund researchers to look into and advise the movement on:
which milestones it should aim towards (including confidence levels for those recommendations). This would potentially reap huge benefits with relatively few movement resources—I could imagine even just a team of 3-5 full-timers could go a long way
Organisations start transparently publishing their theory of victory, and it becomes part of movement culture to dialogue about theories of victory, to both challenge and refine them.
Applying qualities 2 and 4 (power + holistic criteria to choose campaigns & projects)
Intervention evaluators and funders should ensure that interventions are evaluated based on their ability not just to help animals directly, but to build power and generate learning value for the movement.
Applying quality 6 (big picture perspective)
Seeding a meta-organisation to help the movement increase its steering capacity (cheers @Ben Stevenson for pointing me to this post) - for example, by:
continually refining theories of victory / milestones, and our confidence levels in them
tracking success indicators of progress (based on the above theories of victory / milestones)
installing feedback loops to see which interventions are best advancing the theories of victory / milestones
advising the movement on how to best distribute its resources
facilitating organisations, groups and funders to dialogue and coordinate given all of the above
Funding a broader spread of interventions—taking a more hits-based approach, given our current cluelessness about what will make long-term progress
Cheers for engaging James, I appreciate you spending the time on this.
On your second point about timelines: I agree to the extent that talking about theories of victory in fine-grained detail would only be more relevant on shorter timelines. But even on longer timelines (e.g. whether it’s 50 or 200 years), I’d argue we need theories of victory in broad strokes—at least outlining what major outcomes we are reasonably confident would need to happen. Otherwise how can we make bets on what capacities we need to build now? For example, can we be confident that we’re currently investing enough in mechanisms to shift public opinion, or our ability to engage in lobbying? These are just examples—the main point is, I think we should map the terrain even if roughly so we have a better sense of where to walk.
On the “one approach” claim: This is a fair point, it’s probably the least prevalent of the three characteristics I ascribe to short-term pragmatism, and I was a bit hesitant about it. I think it’s largely absent amongst organisational leaders (though I wouldn’t say zero). I decided to include it anyway as I have encountered it plenty in broader movement culture from different camps, and I think culture amongst non-leaders still matters. I’ve seen e.g. claims that things like cage-free, nonviolent disruption, and more recently very often alt-proteins, are “the most effective thing” and the key to changing things for animals. But overall I think in recent years, we’ve moved away from searching for silver bullets and more towards acknowledging that multiple approaches are needed.
Hey Thom, thanks for engaging. I’m evolving my thoughts as I go here, so what ensues might slightly contradict some parts of the main post:
On short-term pragmatism being a straw man: I think you’re right that my description of short-term pragmatism is a straw man at the individual level, but I think it holds true about our movement-level expression. I don’t think any individual non-profit or person would necessarily embody short-term pragmatism — I imagine/hope that everyone involved in a campaign/project has (a) some end goal they truly want; and (b) some model in their head of how their current work moves toward that goal.
But I rarely see those models articulated publicly (and I’ve spoken to quite a few deeply involved people who observe the same). This creates a movement-wide dynamic where, even if many are acting on long-term plans, those plans remain out of sight from others, and unexamined. So even if individuals are thinking long-term, the movement’s collective expression looks short-termist.
The effect of this is that it’s hard to be confident we’re walking an effective path towards a bigger end goal. If we don’t share our theories of victory, we can’t coordinate around them, notice if we’re working at cross-purposes, challenge assumptions, or build on each other’s insights.On timelines: I agree that we should have conversations about timelines to aspire towards (I would add, trying to find a sweet spot between ambitious and realistic). And I think we could have much more productive conversations about that if we made our theories of victory more explicit. FWIW, I have no strong opinions on timelines, probably leaning in the direction of “a few decades at minimum”.
Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy
A proposal for a third way for animal advocacy. In animal advocacy I broadly see two groups: (1) people who strongly want to end animal farming, but whose actions are unlikely to make that happen; (2) people who prioritise reducing animal suffering in the short term within existing systems. The interesting thing is, BOTH of these groups want to end animal farming (or at least factory farming), but neither group is going to make that happen. What would happen if more people embodied a third way: Visionary Pragmatism. An approach which starts with our end goal (e.g. end animal farming), and then gets into the hard work of figuring out the incremental steps needed to get there. What could this approach look like?
I’m quite sympathetic to the sort of approach Rachel Mason discusses at the end of her report Industrial Food Animal Production: How It Works and How We Resist (pp 42-45).
Paraphrasing from that...
Firstly, I think we need to ground ourselves in explicit, shared frameworks for understanding how change will happen. Mason gives several useful examples of frameworks in the report, starting from page 22. Those frameworks will provide us with indicators and suboutcomes that we can aim our efforts towards—these could encompass a wide variety of things from building people power to increasing alt-protein market share to changing public opinion.
We should experiment with different types of interventions designed to make progress on the above indicators and suboutcomes.
We also need to develop strong movement-wide MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning) so that we:
track our progress against our key suboutcomes and indicators
track which interventions are (cost-)effectively moving the needle on those things
adapt based on what we learn and invest in different interventions appropriately.
I think as a movement, we’re pretty good on (2), but could benefit a lot from giving more attention to (1) and (3).