Contentious Citizens: Civil Society's Role in Campaigning for Social Change

This report prepared by the Young Foundation and funded by the Carnegie United Kingdom (UK) Trust in May 2007 provides a detailed analysis and historical overview of the social change campaigning landscape with particular reference to campaigning in a network age. It explores how campaigning can be better supported and makes a series of recommendations intended to support campaigning organisations in raising awareness and responding to pressing and unmet needs.

According to the document, "Social campaigning (as distinct from campaigns used in warfare, politics or business) covers the very diverse practices used in civil society for advocating change to decision-makers - often through public mobilisations or the staging of popular demands, but also through less obvious processes of lobbying and elite organising. It plays a vital role in publicly identifying social problems, proposing ways of tackling them, staging competing claims for the good society, and encouraging association, volunteering and active citizenship." The document then gives a history of social campaigning and discusses the 4 principle challenges of campaigning in the twenty-first century:

1. "How can progressive or sustained campaigns be built in an environment of media moments, celebrity dependence, and tabloid petitions?
2. Who writes the script of the campaign, choosing and framing actions and deciding what counts as success?
3. How can you counter the risks associated with corporate co-option and collaboration with government?
4. How can you target decision makers most effectively in the era of network governance and where campaigns can take place at the level of the local, national and global?"

It concludes with a discussion of the future of campaigning, including the possibility of fragmentation of interest groups and the resulting marginalisation by centres of power. In the document, the following areas are recommended for further investigation to insure the health of social campaigning as a method of civil society initiative:

• Develop stronger champions in government and parliament to protect campaigning from its many enemies - specifically custodianship/sponsorship by a UK government office and a parliamentary guarantee of the freedom to campaign.
• Harness the potential of social campaigning to help re-energise representative democracy including:
  • institutional innovations to build better links between the informal, participatory campaigning arena and formal, representative decision making;
  • citizens’ initiatives – via online petitions – to trigger processes of representative and wider public deliberation;
  • a swift review by the Prime Minister (UK) of the Number 10 e-Petitions site (a site for petitioning the Prime Minister) with a view to improving the role it can play in the democratic debate;
  • civic initiative powers at the local level, beginning with the right to petition to place issues on council agendas and receive a response; and
  • use of local and neighbourhood politics as a particularly fertile space for civic campaigners and elected representatives to mix and collaborate with greater ease.
• Strengthen civil society capacity for innovative and constructive campaigning, from individual entrepreneurs to civic institutions, including:
  • skills development and networking to make it easier for people to campaign, and, as stated by the authors, "to balance the hugely powerful campaign machines at the disposal of big media, big government, and big business";
  • more support for community organisers;
  • supporting projects that push the envelope in terms of methods that can then be spread out more widely, for instance broad-based organising, email open-rate tracking, constituent relationship management, lowering barriers to entry to campaigning, and coordinating online and real-world actions; and
  • the development of innovative civic institutions to foster social campaigning, from new unions working for migrants or the unemployed to campaigning networks.
• Better funding mechanisms for social and civic infrastructures including shared infrastructures.
• Help children get involved in campaigning in their local communities by "learning through doing".
• Review the legal and regulatory context, identify measures which could disproportionately chill or limit campaigning activities, and loosen these constraints wherever possible, including "anti-terrorism" measures.
• More systematic research on how change occurs.

 

Click here to download the 28-page summary of this document in PDF format.

Click here to download the 95-page document in PDF format.