Questions for the advocacy community: Q3 – Sam Bell

Q3 – 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?

Sam Bell:

It seems to me that policy-making is a “single-issue”* enterprise. Candidates campaign on bigger themes – while he promised to close Gitmo and end genocide in Darfur candidate Obama spent more time talking about conducting a more humane, responsible, pragmatic, and cooperative foreign policy. The team Obama appointed might share his vision, temperment and critical view of the last President’s foreign policy, but they haven’t spent the first 100 days trying to create a more humane, responsible, pragmatic, and cooperative foreign policy. Rather, they are trying to figure out the right policies for tough challenges, each presenting a unique maze of obstacles and opportunities. Success is the bottomline. The Obama administration will not be judged on whether they resolved the crisis in Sudan by “unclenching the fist” of the Sudanese government. They will be judged by whether or not they resolve the crisis.

Advocacy should correspond to the policymaking process if intends to influence it. Like it or not, policymaking is quite narrow. While it makes sense to do narrow advocacy, it carries with it (at least) two risks: (1) advocacy can be time- and resource-intensive. By the time momentum is generated on a single issue, the world outside the advocacy bubble could have shifted. (2) single-issue advocacy risks missing important synergies/points of agreement that can advances multiple issues at the same time.

On (1), it takes time and resources to generate advocacy momentum. There are multiple rounds of educating the public and policymakers. Lobbying campaigns take time to plan and execute. So do media blitzes. Even gaining consensus from the many stakeholders in the advocacy world is a heavy lift. The risk is that while all that happens, the outside world changes. I have perhaps more faith than others that advocates themselves can actually change their messages and “asks” to track real-world events, but advocates aren’t the only ones talking about/working on these issues. Media and policymakers and the general public might have a harder time catching up. This is a significant challenge but it can be overcome by smart, persistent and loud advocates.

The much bigger risk is that while advocates build a campaign on their single-issue, another issue pops up that’s actually more urgent and advocates don’t have the resources, knowledge or emotional energy to switch gears or expand their focus. An imaginary scenario – a report by an esteemed panel in 2009 says that loose nukes are the biggest threat to the U.S. and that there will be an attack on the homeland by 2020. Concerned citizens and professional advocates mobilize. They introduce legislation. They raise money for “securing nukes” private initiatives. They spend a year researching and then lobbying the US government and international institutions on a nuanced consensus policy. By 2011, their campaign is well underway and getting media buzz and attention in Congress. In the meantime, a former Soviet republic falls apart and the result is a new reality – unsecured chemical weapons are now much more susceptible to theft and use by terrorists. Is the loose nuke campaign still useful? Sure. But, it also misses the bigger threat – loose chemical weapons.

On (2), advocates who only think, work and care about their single issue might miss opportunities to advance their issues by joining forces with others. Sudan advocates have tried for many years to influence Chinese policy regarding Khartoum. We are not alone. The list of single-issue advocates trying to get the US Government to change Chinese policy is long. North Korea, Tibet, Burma, Zimbabwe, etc.. And, that’s just on human rights. What if these single-issue advocates had developed a joint “ask” before the Beijing Olympics. President Bush and the United States will fully support the games and will say how great China is if Beijing commits to abstaining on any R2P issues that come before the Security Council. This is just one example and perhaps a bad one. The point is that advocates sometimes fall into the trap of believing that everyone – if they hear all the important details about the issue – can be convinced that it should be a top priority. Everyone’s not going to be convinced no matter how convinced the advocates are. But, there are other ways to get the unconvinced to take action – including link your issue with one that they do think is a top priority. (I should mention that this is really hard.)

The fix for these two pitfalls? Institutions/movements that (a) can take on multiple singe-issues, (b) are nimble enough to re-prioritize and (3) are hooked into larger debates/policy work going on around them.

*In my mind, single-issue doesn’t have to be area-specific. It can also be undertaken in pursuit of specific structural or institutional change.

Sam Bell is the Executive Director of the Genocide Intervention Network