Questions for the Advocacy Community – Part III

In the final section of this series, advocates respond to the question:

What are the costs/benefits of single issue advocacy? Does the focus on a single issue crowd out the potential to focus on structural changes that would be required to deal with both the single issue and other related issues?

The question arises from discussions I have had over time with policy-makers talking frustratedly how the focus of the “crisis of the day” pulls their resources – both time and financial – away from the longer-term, less visible underlying changes that are needed in order to deal more effectively with such crises in the future.

My view is that of course both are needed – We have to be able to do single issue advocacy while also addressing issues of structural change that impact that single issue. But, as always, the difficulty is how to calibrate the balance.

Today, Alex de Waal continues to look at both the global campaign to ban landmines and activism around HIV/AIDS.  In the first, the leaders of the campaign were pressured to go broader than just a ban on landmines, and were also always juggling the issue of whether “success” was a legal ban, or the accomplishment of a norm against landmine use more generally. On the second, de Waal notes how HIV/AIDS campaigners were criticized for the resources that an “AIDS exceptionalism” approach drew away from the healthcare system in general.

John Norris challenges the critics of single-issue advocacy, arguing that it is simply commonsensical that people are drawn to a single issue, and that not everyone who works on a single issue has to be involved in the structural factors underlying that issue.