Resource Library

As the seasons’ turn, new life and opportunities emerge. The Lab’s first Spring Community Call to re-ground in community, plant seeds of understanding on our movement’s key priorities and challenges, and nurture dialogue with other leaders about what it takes to build durable power and win equitable solutions.
Social science research affirms the need for “critical capacities” of effective social movements. The Lab has identified 5 critical capacities including strategic, organizing, narrative, disruptive, and electoral/institutional. During this Spring Community Call, we explore what these are and reflect on how these critical capacities are connected to building a powerful multi-racial, cross-class climate movement. In this community call, participants leave with:
• New and strengthened relationships with other leaders in the movement
• A snapshot of the climate movement’s current opportunities and gaps
• Concrete ways to apply the “5 critical capacities framework”
Together, we create a space of learning across the Lab community and inspire one another with our collectively held and distinct experiences.
 

At the Lab, we are wrapping up field research projects with six great partner climate advocacy organizations. While I can’t wait to share what we’ve learned once they are complete, today I wanted to provide some of my reflections on best practices for field research I’ve learned from these tests and other projects. Think of these as extra dollops of advice on top of our core guidance on research and testing and Learning 101*.

Protests can affect public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior, but it’s less clear that protests directly influence policymaking. Specifically, impacts of protest on policy seems highly context dependent, on factors such as existing political structures and current public opinion. The effect sizes of protest on public opinion and voting behavior are somewhat small, yet quite significant in the realm of politics, with shifts of approximately 2-5% found via natural experiments. There is strong evidence that protest can be effective in North America and Western Europe, specifically within issues of civil rights, climate change, and social welfare. This resource argues that the evidence for protests inspiring short-term and medium-term change is much stronger than the evidence for long-term change—but that’s because of the difficulty of studying the direct effects of protests on long-term outcomes.