Theory of Change & Power
Last updated
Last updated
At Animal Think Tank, our theory of change is informed by movement theory and strategic nonviolence. A "theory of change" is how we believe change will happen and pretty much all organisations and people working for animal justice have one, even if it isn't written down or explicit. Movement theory is all about how movements build power, pressure institutions, reach the hearts and minds of the majority and ultimately win. Strategic nonviolence is a tradition that has existed for a long time and has been used in many different parts of the world and at different points in history. Its most famously associated with MLK during the Civil Rights movement and Gandhi in the Indian Independence movement.
People have written pages upon pages about these topics and it's impossible to get all of it down in one place. Here is a useful overview of some key concepts nonetheless...
Theory of Power
The common conception of power is that it is held at the top. The "top" being government, politicians, courts, CEOs and big business. These are the people and institutions who create the rules and determine our destiny, right? Only partly. Of course, top-down examples of power are important for us to acknowledge, understand and use to our advantage. But there's a problem when we always look to top-down power holders to create change or as the only avenues for creating change. This is where the alternative view of power comes in...
On the right, you can see that all the folks on the bottom are actually maintaining the structure and holding up the person at the top. This is a powerful metaphor to describe how ordinary people hold power in society. The bottom-up view of power points out that institutions, big businesses and governments rely on our cooperation or permission to function. For example, looking at parliament we might say that they: need to be recognised by the public as having legitimacy and authority to make decisions, need many skilled people from a variety of disciplines, need material resources produced by others, need people to administer punishments to those who break the law.
So with good organisation and strategy, we can choose to take that co-operation away and intervene in the system when we feel that there is injustice. This helps to create the needed incentive, pressure and power shift for change. The key things to take away from this are:
That people are agents of change
Powerholders are reliant on our cooperation to survive
The actions, commitment, sacrifices, donations and support of many people are our main sources of power.
Why Nonviolence?
The strategic merits of nonviolent struggle have been shown in cases ranging from the Indian Independence Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Colour Revolutions in the Eastern Bloc and the Arab Spring. Strategists like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Gene Sharp have written about the dynamics of nonviolent struggle. These observations were proven through a study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in their seminal work Why Civil Resistance Works. They analysed 322 revolutionary movements and found:
Nonviolent struggles were twice as likely to succeed than violent campaigns
Successful nonviolent revolutionary struggles had a 40% chance of becoming stable democracies, compared to only 5% of successful violent campaigns.
Nonviolent struggles can engage millions of people, compared to violent ones, which never organised in excess of 50,000.
While violent campaigns are sometimes successful, nonviolent campaigns are more likely to achieve legislative objectives and create a more just society.
Nonviolent struggle is a whole tradition and discipline in itself. Its methods have shown to be of great use to groups with little access to the traditional channels of power and have shown to transform societies.
Intervention and Disruption
Nonviolence is all about creating constructive and well managed conflict. Conflict and tension are a gateway to deeper transformation and are a catalyst for change. Through disruptive (meaning socially, economically, politically disruptive) protest we are able to achieve several things:
We create a situation that can't be ignored. This pushes our target to negotiate and to rethink their priorities - without this pressure there is little incentive to actually move and change.
We create a power shift. By creating a crisis that can't be ignored we help to shift the distribution of power between different groups. We pull it from the folks that can't be trusted with it and bring it to social movements that, for the time being, represent animal interests.
We open up the discussion to the public. Controversy is a powerful tool that we can use to start getting the public to talk about an issue by drawing needed attention to it; disruption helps to push it into the public sphere which helps it become a widely accepted political issue.
We shift the Overton window. The Overton window refers to the initiatives and policies that are considered politically acceptable to talk about at any given time. So we help to make animal ethics more and more politically acceptable to talk about.
Disruption, civil disobedience, arrests, controversy and conflict show up time and time again in the history of social movements. These are important and necessary ingredients for making real transformative change. As much as we would all like to transition to a better world quietly and without upsetting anyone it just doesn't happen. The truth is animal exploitation is a bedrock in our economy, food system, moral frameworks and understanding of what it is to be human. There is no way of uprooting these systems and beliefs that won't result in serious pushback. So it's much better to engage in this conflict intentionally and in a mature way.
Meta-Narrative
Human beings understand and relate to the world through stories. Messages can evoke certain emotions and associations in us that can draw us in or away. Framing an issue in the right way is vital in order to get many people to understand, digest and be persuaded by it. A famous example of excellent messaging comes from the LGBTQ movement in the States; they made a conscious switch to start talking about gay marriage as a freedom and as a show of love and commitment instead of as a right. This helped to create the conditions for the Supreme Court ruling in 2015 guaranteeing the right to same-sex marriage.
If we look to Martin Luther King and Gandhi, they were able to articulate complicated ideas and politics in a language that many could understand and they were able to relate it to values that many held. This is key to change and is the inspiration behind our Narrative work at Animal Think Tank.
The Ecology Approach
Movement Ecology - this talks to the health of the wider movement as a whole. This includes the diversity of organisations, coordination and unity.
In addition to disruptive protest, there are many other ways in which to create change. As mentioned earlier, people and organisations generally hold a theory of change: an idea of how change might happen. Broadly speaking there are three main camps:
Personal empowerment. The idea here is that through taking personal responsibility for the issue and encouraging others to take on that responsibility as well we will then create change. We model the values and practices that we want others to adhere to as well. We make changes to our personal lives that align with our beliefs. Doing all the things that you as an individual can do.
For example:
Going vegan
Going zero waste or choosing not to fly
Empowering yourself to speak to others about the issue
Building Alternatives. The idea here is that change will happen on the edges and that we have to start creating alternatives to the system so we can increase the amount of people who don’t have to rely on it. Rather than changing the existing institutions we ought to bring into being our vision of the future e.g. Vegan Economy, Tech Solutions, Eco-Villages, Co-operatives, Animal Sanctuaries & Rescues. This helps to build spaces where a different culture can flourish and alternatives to the status quo can exist and thrive.
Changing Dominant Institutions. The idea here is that by pushing dominant institutions to make structural change we can have a much wider and deeper impact. Let's focus on changing the rules and then everything else will follow. So this might mean pursuing legislative change, either by holding a mass demonstration or by bringing a case to court. Other examples would be Animal Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion, the Green Party, Black Lives Matter.
Each of these different approaches tackles an issue in a different way. They all help to organise different kinds of people to become active in the movement. Considering all of this, the lesson to take away is that each of them have their strengths and weakness but fundamentally they are all needed to create change. No one individual or organisation changes the world by themselves; it's the collective effort of many people over a generation or two that does it. The most successful movements throughout history have developed a healthy ecology and built bridges between these different camps.
Broad-based Support and Winning the Public
Ultimately what we aim to do is shift public opinion and win mass public support. Generally powerholders concede to what the majority of the public believes and the dominant culture. We want to get a critical mass of people using our narrative, moral frameworks and promoting our solutions. If the public believe that exploiting animals is wrong and are prepared to take action and speak out against it, then change becomes unavoidable. We want to work towards "broad-based" support. This means that many different people from different parts of society take action and believe in the cause; parents, teachers, lorry drivers, politicians, doctors, academics, scientists, students, young people etc. This will take a long time, and we are likely to face a lot of pushback before we gain support, but finding ways to bring onboard unlikely allies is key to making change.
For a more detailed explanation of our ToC see the Strategic Playbook
Here is the Strategy Reading List for some key texts on this.
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