Questions for the advocacy community: Q2 – Marc Gustafson

Q2: Is citizen advocacy at its most effective when it generates maximum “noise” on an issue , or do citizen advocates need to attach particular policy prescriptions to the noise they make?

Marc Gustafson:

There can be no framework for measuring the efficacy of advocacy groups. Some are successful because they bring awareness to typically neglected problems, while others work behind the scenes to shape the policy-making process. Often, advocacy campaigns, in their most nascent stage of growth, focus solely on raising awareness, i.e. generating “maximum noise”. If the advocacy campaigns are successful in this first stage, then they will direct their followers, funds and energy towards shaping policy. I’ll call this the transition from an awareness campaign to an advocacy campaign.  (It is rare that a successful awareness campaign does not follow this pattern; can you think of any examples?) The speed at which campaigns transition from one stage to the next determines the campaign’s negative or positive impact, i.e. the “cost/benefit” on the advocacy issue.

To demonstrate what I mean, let’s look at the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) – and please note that I do not intend to conflate the SDC with the entire American activist movement for Darfur. The SDC started as an awareness campaign with the sole purpose of generating “maximum noise” for its issue. Instead of a policy agenda, the group decided to launch a highly commercialized marketing campaign. Like any marketing campaign, the issues had to be simplified for public consumption. The issues also had to be provocative in order to cultivate public outcry and concern.  For example, instead of describing the complex history of ecological, administrative and political causes of the war in Darfur, the SDC leaned more towards the provocative explanations of racism and morality. In doing so, the conflict was highly mischaracterized.

Despite (or, due to) this strategy, the campaign was extremely successful in reaching out to millions of Americans and inspiring many to take action. Once the SDC reached this high level of success, at the end of 2005, the campaign experienced/facilitated the aforementioned transition from being an awareness campaign to being an advocacy campaign. They hired lobbyists and began to use their large following to pressure policy-makers. The problem, however, was that the solutions they advocated, i.e. military intervention and punishment of the government of Sudan, were based on a misconception of the conflict. The rebel groups, who started the war in 2003, were mostly ignored. The peace process in Abuja was also neglected. The historical, ecological and administrative causes of the conflict could not be addressed because SDC activists were advocating for solutions to the problems of racial and ethnic divisions.

Could the SDC have prevented these problems and responded more appropriately to the conflict in Darfur? Yes, but only if the speed of its transition from being an awareness campaign to being an advocacy campaign had been more measured. If the SDC had taken the time to provide its participants with a more comprehensive understanding of the conflict, then perhaps the many member institutions of the SDC would have advocated for funding the Abuja Peace Talks or other comprehensive peace negotiations instead of things like military intervention, economic sanctions, the hiring of private militias and the implementation of no-fly-zones in Darfur – things that did worsen, or could have worsened the situation in Sudan.

This is not to say that generating “maximum noise” over the Darfur issue (or any other issue) has not been and will not be important, but the consequences of moving too quickly, from generating noise to championing policy prescriptions, can be destructive to the campaign and the issue itself.

Marc Gustafson is a doctoral candidate and Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford. He is currently writing his dissertation on the impact of activism on the Darfur conflict: marcgustafson@gmail.com