Big transformational social, political and cultural changes aren’t driven by individuals, organisations or coalitions acting alone. They’re driven by all of these and more as part of diverse social movements applying pressure over decades. If we want to contribute to strong movements, we need to be able to assess how healthy they are and what kind of interventions will strengthen them. I thought it would be useful to share a few things about how to do this from my own experience, having developed and led courses on the subject for Ulex and the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, and having mapped a bunch myself (including the UK Climate & Women’s & Youth movements, as well as the historical environmental and LGBTQ+ movements).
What is a social movement?
The term ‘movement’ is somewhat overused for everything from describing organisations’ own email lists to formal coalitions and networks of activist groups. When I use the term, I mean something much broader than this. According to Italian Sociologist Mario Diani, there is no academic consensus on what a movement is, but he says that most definitions share the following criteria:
- networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations,
- engaged in political or cultural conflicts,
- on the basis of shared collective identity.
I question the third of these as I think often movements can be made up of very disparate actors with different theories of change who don’t share a collective identity, but who are all working on the same conflict. For example, lobbyists and activists could both be working to further a cause as part of a broader movement with no discernable common identity. When I talk about movements, I mean all the actors (individual, collective and organisational) working to make progress on a particular cause.
I would describe organisations like Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion as movement organisations, not as movements in themselves. Then there are ‘movement moments’ or ‘moments of the whirlwind’ where a trigger event kicks off national / international action and people flow onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands (currently the movement for Palestinian liberation; recently Black Lives Matter, Me Too, XR etc.). These moments of peak activity require the groundwork to be laid down in the years and decades preceding them by actors right across a movement, even though they appear spontaneous. I’ve written more about these ‘movement moments’ in the past, including analysis from Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan & US Momentum trainings, in pieces on Activism or Clicktivism, Ecologies of UK Social Movements and Extinction Rebellion.
Why map your movement?
Any good campaign or social change focused organisational strategy should have a radical inspiring vision for the future at its heart, describing the world you’re working to create where the issue/s you work on have been solved. If you agree that the big transformational change needed to achieve your vision requires hard work of multiple actors across strong movements re-imagining the future, changing minds and redistributing power, it makes sense to strategically place your work for social change within a broader movement context. Any actor in a movement can play its part in strengthening or weakening the whole. A movement mapping helps you understand the landscape, the other players, what’s missing, what’s most needed, and where things like power imbalances and conflicts are causing problems.
“Movements build power not by selling people products they already want, but instead by transforming what people think is possible.”
Hahrie Han
What are the boundaries of a social movement?
Movements often overlap with each other – the famous 1980s occupation of Greenham common is a good example of an overlap of the women’s and peace movements. They also fit inside each other, with larger general movements containing smaller more specific ones. For example, the environmental movement contains climate, conservation, nature access, countryside protection and so on. Boundaries of movements are amorphous and change over time. Identifying your movement and mapping it is not an exact science, and it is very subjective. Your exact issue is unlikely to have a whole movement behind it, so you’ll probably have to go bigger and broader to find a space with enough actors and activity, where if progress is made it is likely to improve your issue also. Then you can see if its possible to mainstream your issue across the wider movement, or to strengthen the part of the movement focusing on it.
How to map your movement
1) Bring in multiple perspectives
A movement’s strength derives from the diversity and number of its active participants. The more perspectives you can gather for your movement mapping, the better your insights will be. This is especially important when you get to actually mapping and speaking to people (step five) but it’s also useful to get input on earlier stages – identifying the movement, deciding on an approach and clarifying your questions.
2) Identify your movement
If your movement isn’t obvious, it’s best to start with your issue/s then scale up until you get to something that has a serious movement behind it – meaning a large number of different actors, with multiple approaches to making change, taking this forwards over long periods of time. To get an idea of the categories of actors you might find in a healthy UK social movement, my movement ecology typography could be helpful. If your issue has a lot of actors but they’re all doing research, policy and advocacy work it isn’t really a social movement – you’ll want to think about what wider movement or movements it sits within.
You should also consider the boundaries of the kinds of actors you’re including in the movement. For example, I wouldn’t generally include active decision makers like senior politicians, or corporations and their CSR departments, but I have included philanthropic funders. And of course, you’ll need to set geographical boundaries. I would suggest these should be wider than the very local to be considered a movement, but they could be regional, national, continental, some configuration of international international or global. It goes without saying that the wider your boundaries in every sense, the greater the work needed to understand the movement well.
3) Decide on your approach to the mapping
To determine your approach, you first need to work out what is it you want to know. The suggestions below are by no means exhaustive – you can mix and match several, just do one, or add in others depending on what makes most sense.
a) Listing out your actors
This is a really common first step for people, to get an idea of who is in your movement. With some very basic categorisation, doing this and getting a list of contacts into an airtable or spreadsheet is enough. When some people map their movement, they’re looking for groups to contact about opportunities to collaborate, attend events, or support in other ways – listing them out, researching contacts and reaching out to them might be enough, perhaps as a precursor to just asking openly what they need / what kind of support they would like. If this isn’t enough, it is still a useful first stage before any more detailed classification through the approaches below (although such approaches will prompt you to think of additional actors that don’t come to mind immediately).
Do you think your movement may be missing some important approaches to making change? E.g. not enough direct action and too much advocacy work? Or are you just not sure what the balance of approaches is in your movement? Then you’ll want to bring in a movement ecology approach. This is set out clearly in my blog linked above, but essentially it involves classifying movement actors by the approaches they take to making change – activists, lobbyists, policy and research, bridge building, deep and shallow public engagement, etc.
c) Relationships, power and conflict
If you’re concerned your movement isn’t sufficiently interconnected, that some actors are hoarding power, or that conflicts are a major problem, then this relational approach could work for you. It’s a visual form of stakeholder mapping that was developed on the Ulex Ecology of Social Movements course I used to lead. It depicts the power of relative actors within a movement through their relative size, along with their interrelationships with each other, the strength of these relationships, and conflicts.
- To start, list out all the actors / organisations / groups etc you can think of that are in your movement
- Size paper circles (or do this online with your favourite visual collaboration software/platform) according to their relative power (within the movement)
- Map the linkages and connections between the actors
Below is an example of what such a mapping looks like on paper, from a Ulex course teaching aid. It depicts an imagining of what the movement to free Tibet might look like:
One straight line linking movement actors shows a weak relationship, two straight lines a strong one; one wiggly line depicts a conflict; dotted lines are bridges between disparate areas of he movement. You could add in additional coded visuals to capture the relationships you’re exploring. For example, two crossed straight lines could show a formal alliance, an arrow from one to another a dependence, and so on.
d) Problem centred theory of change
If you want to check whether or not all routes to solve the problem you’re working on are being deployed across your movement, you may want to develop a problem centred theory of change (as proposed by Jim Coe and Rhonda Shlangen in their advocacy evaluation paper ‘No Royal Road‘).
As the diagram below shows, you start in the centre of a series of concentric circles with what needs to change, then consider who or what needs to do things differently to make that change, what the barriers are to that happening, and what could augment or diminish these barriers. Then you’re in a position to map which organisations are working to tackle which barriers, and identify any gaps or areas of weakness in which you’re best placed to intervene.
Below is an example of what this might look like in practice, from some of my old work with a campaign around UK hunger. The list of actors working on the different barriers was done on a separate piece of paper so isn’t shown, but the exercise did throw up some spaces the campaign hadn’t thought to intervene in, identified as work needed to make progress that wasn’t getting enough focus from others. For example, the fear around campaigning and media framing as circled were identified as potential areas of intervention.
e) Historical timeline
In order to understand the quirks and structure of your movement, it can be helpful to look back across multiple decades of its history to understand the roots of where things are now. You can break your movement down decade by decade to see who was active at the time, what their focus was, how they made change, how they collaborated and so on. Much can be learned from past victories and failures. The findings can be easily depicted through a visual timeline describing important milestones like headline grabbing direct actions, legislative changes, big marches and moments of peak movement activity, publication of important pieces of research, etc.
5) Get mapping
All the above approaches can be undertaken by speaking with those active in the movement now, in whatever format makes most sense to you. One to one conversations can be great for in depth discussion and insights, and if the content of these conversations is kept confidential this has the added advantage of people feeling free to be honest. Group discussions/ workshops can add energy to the discussion, and enable people to bounce off each others’ ideas, but may miss detail on potential problems peoples wouldn’t want to speak about on the record. Online surveys can also play their part if you have the resources and networks to attract and process lots of responses, but these can lead to somewhat shallow analysis, and they’re easily skewed to getting responses only from those groups who have time to spare.
If you’re a paid staff member for an organisation with resources, you should be offering payment to those whose opinions you’re engaging, especially if they’re from smaller organisations and/or grassroots / marginalised groups. Whether your organisation is big and structured or grassroots, you’ll want to think about offering participants support in kind, and to be clear about how helping you will contribute to shared goals.
Taking the historical approach (e) may also involve speaking to those who are no longer participating actively in movements, as well as hitting the history books. I found the British Library super valuable for this kind of work in the past; local university libraries may be similarly helpful, depending on the kinds of courses they run (e.g. social and political sciences).
Writing up findings can be helpful to really get your thoughts in order, but short summary papers are the most accessible to others in your group or organisation, and visuals are even better.
6) Feed findings into your strategy and plans
The whole point of mapping your movement is to understand how best your group or organisation’s work can make the movement stronger. This might mean putting energy into an approach to change that’s generally lacking across the movement (in my experience, often deep public engagement / organising or activism). Or it could mean bridging parts of the movement that aren’t working together; addressing major movement conflicts; challenging the power balance within a movement; or working on a barrier to success no-one else is.
In working out what you do, it makes sense to play to your strengths – for example, a big NGO often isn’t best placed to kickstart direct action or community organising, so may want to incubate a new project/organisation or support groups already doing this work. Effective activity can also involve creating spaces to bring movement actors together, provide missing movement infrastructure and much more. It will all depend on what your mapping highlights as a problem.
7) Share your findings
This might be the most important step! So many mapping exercises are commissioned by NGOs, funders etc. to never see the light of day beyond their organisation. But this work is useful to everyone else in your movement, and sharing it is one of the ways to help others to strengthen it. This is one of the reasons I publish the work I do as much as possible. It would be wonderful to have a space to share such mappings within and across movements – comparing your movement to another can also be really useful.
As ever, I’d love to hear what you think of my suggestions. Do you have other mapping approaches to share? Have I got something wrong or missed something fundamental? Please comment below or continue the conversation with me on Twitter or Linked In. If you’d like some help, training, or someone to lead mapping of your movement, this is exactly the kind of work I love to do, so please get in touch.
thinking, doing, changing 