Tearfund has always been one of my favourite civil society organisations – above all because they have such a great track record of being a ‘pathfinder’ for other NGOs. They had climate change as a top campaigning priority long before most other development NGOs had really started to engage with it, for example. And now I think they’re about to do it again – with some deeply exciting work they’re doing on their future advocacy and campaigning strategy (which I’m involved in as a consultant).
Tearfund’s starting point in this work is a pretty radical one for a development NGO: a recognition of the basic paradox that the more the world succeeds on development, the more it fails on sustainability.
It’s a point we see most vividly in the fact that those countries deemed to have finished this process we call ‘development’ – developed countries – are also those with the highest per capita environmental impact. But you can see it as well in the fact that those countries that have seen most poverty reduction in recent decades are also the ones where emissions have risen fastest; China’s per capita emissions are now higher than those of the EU, for instance.
One purpose of their ‘Horizon’ project, then, is to start imagining what it would look like for us to move to an economy that was both just and sustainable – at all levels, from global policy right down to what it would mean for individual families. (You can read a background think piece that sets out some of our early thinking and ideas here – n.b. it really is just a think piece, and not in any way a statement of Tearfund policy.)
At the same time, the project also has a second purpose: exploring the new kinds of influence and change that will be needed to unlock change on this scale. Tearfund have recognised very candidly in their internal thinking that traditional ‘insider’ lobbying strategies will have limited power here. (Having spent the past ten years trying to support change in the multilateral system, I’ve reached a similar conclusion myself.)
Instead, alternative approaches will be needed – ones that propagate different norms, built new kinds of movement, create new coalitions for change, and use environmental, social, and economic shocks to fuller effect.
To help get this process underway, we ran a couple of fascinating conversations in London last week with various leading thinkers from government, think tanks, other NGOs, and business. Oxfam’s Duncan Green, who participated in one of the events, has written up a blog post with some reflections here. I distilled some of my own take-aways in a talk I gave at Tearfund after we’d run the two conversations, which you can read here.
Update: Green Economy Coalition’s Emily Benson, who took part in the other event from Duncan Green, has blogged her reflections on the conversation here.
