Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe). She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance, where she published her first book Displacement, Development, and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? Her latest book is Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local. She holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the co-founder of an independent and progressive think tank, New Zealand Alternative. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute (the German Internet Institute) and a Faculty Affiliate at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.

Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (Bauer 2016b). MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States (Heaney and Rojas 2007; Busby 2010). Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election (Vromen 2017).

This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world from the United States to Europe, Australasia, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members.[…]

First, I want to understand how the same form of advocacy organization emerged in such different contexts. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations? Second, I want to contribute to international relations (IR) theories of advocacy, which have typically focused on larger international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Oxfam and Greenpeace, or transnational advocacy networks focused on particular issues, such as climate change, human rights, or land mines. I ask: to what extent do digital advocacy organizations require new IR theories of advocacy?

- Nina Hall
Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local, p.2

THE CREATIVE PROCESS' ONE PLANET PODCAST

Can you unpack for us the ways the new digital advocacy groups differ from traditional advocacy groups?

NINA HALL

So one of the main arguments in the book is that digital technology is important to how organizations campaign, and it's not a matter of campaigning online or offline, right? Often people hear the title of my book and they go, “Oh, it's all just slacktivism.” You know, whatever you do online is slacktivism. Luckily the academic debates move past that because most advocacy groups operate both online and offline. What I argue instead is that digital technology has enabled groups to be rapid response, like you said, extremely member-driven so they can listen to their members and do something called analytic activism (that's a term coined by David Karpf) and be multi-issue generalists. The ways that works is much more than meets the eye. So when you're rapid response, that means a news story can come on one hour and two hours later a campaign can be started by the organizations. So it could be related to refugee issues. In 2015, when there was increasing concern about what was happening on Europe's borders with refugees and asylum seekers, some of these groups that had no expertise in refugee rights switched very rapidly when they saw public opinion changing.

ONE PLANET PODCAST

Why do you feel it wasn't being looked at? I'm wondering if it's because they have such brief campaigns and are constantly evolving?

HALL

There's a couple of reasons I think that it slipped attention. Partly because International Relations has tended to focus on large professionalized international NGOs, groups that many of your listeners are probably familiar with, like Greenpeace, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but in being focused on those now well-established professional NGOs, our scholarship had missed, in my view, the rise of new forms of organization, which the digital era had enabled. So scholars since the nineties had written about how digital communications could be useful for sharing messages and tactics between different activists around the world, but they hadn't asked how is it going to change the very form? The very organizational structure, and this is where I think political communications scholars who really got interested in digital technology and how it was shaping political communications had done some writing and they had spelled out the ways that we were seeing new, what they called hybrid forms of organization that were blurring the boundaries between social movements or media or political parties.

Most of their literature was focused on national impact. So for IR scholars, it was flying under the radar because these were organizations that might be shaping national debates, but they weren't seen to have an international impact. And one of the things my book does is spell out how, even though these groups might be targeting national actors - ministers, government officials, prime ministers - they can influence public opinion in important ways on international issues like trade, climate, and refugees.

The Power of Digital Advocacy Organizations

IR scholars have often argued that NGOs’ power derives from their expertise and authority on an issue (Allan 2021; Haas 1990; Stroup and Wong, 2017). Most NGOs are focused and committed to a particular set of issues; for example, Greenpeace focuses on the environment and Amnesty International on human rights. Campaign decision-making is typically top-down, as professional staff determine which causes to focus on. NGOs regularly engage in agenda-setting and awareness-raising to educate the public and decision-makers on new issues (Keck and Sikkink 1998). They exchange their specialized knowledge to gain access to international organizations and decision-makers (Tallberg et al. 2015). NGOs often engage in lobbying: seeking meetings with decision-makers to directly influence them. There are many other strategies NGOs may engage in: monitoring government’s implementation of on international agreements, ‘naming and shaming’ governments that do not keep their promises, litigation, or ‘direct enforcement’ (where they take the law into their own hands) (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Bondaroff 2014; Murdie and Urpelainen, 2015; Princen 1995; Setzer and Brynes 2019). NGOs can inform public opinion and mobilize ‘moral movements’ to put pressure on their respective governments (Busby 2010). All of these strategies involve NGOs committing to their particular causes over a sustained period, and building up a degree of expertise on this issue. IR has not examined how the digital era has changed the strategies, and power, of advocacy organizations.

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local, p.12-13

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Riya Patel. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).