Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.
Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was the Director & Strategy lead at Animal Rebellion + in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.
My blog (often EA related content)
Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here
Whilst I do agree with a good amounts of the point in this critique, such as the need for cost effectiveness, I also have some strong concerns about a few things said in both the general post, as well as some comments.
For context, I’ve been working with Extinction Rebellion UK (XR UK) full-time for almost two years, since just after they launched, as well as with the slightly newer Animal Rebellion.
To start with, some concerns from the original post:
and
Speaking from my experience at XR, I definitely do think that certain kinds of impactful climate activism are neglected. To give some anecdotal evidence to start, let’s talk about XR. XR was found to be the largest influencer on climate change according to research presented at COP25. Yet, I would say XR is extremely funding constrained currently, having just an income of £46,000 in December 2020, whilst still having thousands of volunteers across the UK. Two key points I would like to make here are:
1. Just because a movement has thousands of volunteers, it does not mean it has a large and steady income stream. You seem to assume this about TSM however logically I don’t think it carries any weight. I know for XR and I would wager for TSM too that 50%+ of all donations come not from individuals, but from grant-making bodies or individual philanthropists. My point here is that once this assumption falls, there is no justification for saying TSM is not impactful on the margins, or that TSM isn’t funding constrained. I would actually argue the opposite; As TSM has thousands of engaged volunteers, if it had greater funding capacity, it could look to take on some volunteers into full-time staff positions and greatly increase the capacity and impact of TSM.
2. That not all progressive activism is equal. Something I believe that both you and jackva allude to (or directly say) is that we can lump together a groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF with TSM and Extinction Rebellion. I think there is a huge distinction between your traditional NGO (FoE and WWF) versus a movement whose priority is shifting public support, mobilising volunteers and using civil disobedience as a theory of change.
On the second point, I think there is an abundance of traditional NGO climate campaigning—WWF, Greenpeace, FoE and so on. I would say the main theory of change they apply is advising policy and public education. Whereas if you look at the number of groups who are trying to mobilise a large base of people to engage in non-violent direct action for the climate, I would say there is only two meaningful groups left in this regard: TSM and XR. This is a huge topic that I might make another post generally on the EA Forum about but for the time-being, I’m going to link to an article by someone from Open Phil discussing the necessity for an ecology of change that includes mass protest and civil disobedience as a key and neglected piece in recent times. In addition, here is a full report funded by Open Phil on the topic of funding social movement doing civil disobedience. In short, I think that it’s not possible to equate the money given to other progressive “activist” groups and money given to TSM as being given for the same theory of change, as they are fundamentally different. So whilst climate NGOs are not neglected, social movements for the climate are.
I think there is a misunderstanding here in what TSM’s strategy around polarisation is. From my understanding of Momentum-Driven Organising, the methodology applied by TSM and XR, that the explicit goal isn’t to literally polarise the debate so it becomes more partisan. Rather, the goal is the move people on the spectrum of support from neutral or passive, to active supporters. This might be through taking actions that by consequence polarise the debate, but the explicit goal is never to actually push people further away and I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that it is. As we’ve spoken about at XR, a good action is one that bring more people over to our active supporters side than we might push away, as the aim in our movement is always building people power and public support. While this may feel like a pedantic point to make, I think it’s an important distinction.
Also I couldn’t find the exact quote from yourself however I get the general gist from your post and comments that funding groups like TSM is sub-optimal relative to CATF due to the difficulty in qualitatively measuring the outcome of such a complex system. I worry this risk-aversion in our funding will constrain us to options that are limited to technological innovation and very discrete policy change (CATF basically) whilst excluding the more opaque, yet still valuable, systems of social movements and people-powered campaigns.
I believe this has been a large problem throughout EA for years and I can’t recall any EA groups giving money to social movements in the past 4-5 years (besides Open Phil giving to Ayni Institue in 2016) which seems ridiculous, given that we’ve just been talking about the huge impact that groups like TSM, XR, Fridays for Future or people like Greta have had on the climate movement. Generally it seems EA funders are too risk averse to fund social movements early on because they don’t have enough quantifiable metrics to prove our impact or people just don’t certain practices (the latter was said to me in a grant application to ACE). Then 3-5 years down the line, we see comments like those by jackva above, saying that groups like TSM would have been a great bet 4 years ago. Whilst this is a more general point and off the topic of TSM specifically, it seems like we should reconcile this and start funding social movements earlier.
To close, the comment by jackva: