Challenging the Western Approach to Advocacy, Part 1

This week, am asking people I respect a tremendous amount to weigh in on some of the more contentious humanitarian issues, everything from the costs and benefits of advocacy to the question of neutrality and legitimacy.

Today's contributor is Neha Erasmus - she spent a number of years working in Sudan with various NGOs, and now works for an advocacy and research institute based in London.  She grew up in Kenya and has also lived in India, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Neha's posts critique how many western-based organizations undertake advocacy.  Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.

For musings from this week's other contributors, see here.

Challenging the western approach to advocacy, part 1

I’ve never worked in a large advocacy organisation, mostly because of personal prejudice. While the organization for which I work is part advocacy organisation, it is definitely not large and quite different to most. Our advocacy is not planned or programmed, but guided by the work we undertake.

My personal prejudice was a rather ill-informed but intuitive understanding gained through having grown up in Kenya, where it was normal for 30-40 people to die in matatu crashes everyday.

Whenever I was forced to watch the world news (courtesy of my father), I marveled that things like one policeman being shot in London were making headlines. I therefore grew up thinking of Western countries as wimpy drama queens and I think I projected this on to Western advocacy organisations.

It’s therefore rather ironic that in 2006, after working in Southern Sudan for some time, I believed that communication was a really important part of ‘making a difference’. I began an MA in Media and Human Rights, but by the end of the course I had resolved to stay far away from mainstream media or advocacy.

I still believe that communicating with people is very important, but I have come to the conclusion (again probably uninformed and very much intuitively) that large advocacy organisations like Save Darfur are doing things the wrong way and consequently creating a new set of problems.

While beginning my dissertation on Indian philosophy and the problematics of human rights, I came across something by Gandhi that allowed me to rethink standard views on advocacy: “Right action needs no propaganda”, he said to Ronald Duncan, a visiting writer. I thought back to Gandhi’s incredible story and my own experiences and realised how right he was. Truth needs no propaganda; it is its own source of power. Think about the most profound things you have seen, read, experienced and done; think about the people you love and respect the most; you will find that truth will be at the heart of them.

The binding ‘rule’ if you like, of Indian philosophy is that one must think, speak and act with truth (truth here does not refer to simple honesty, but has a much greater and deeper meaning); and it is not enough to do one, or two; without all three, there will be negative repercussions. In my view, if these advocacy organisations (and indeed any kind of organisation) wish to work effectively, they must seek to do this.

I must of course acknowledge that there are a number of constraints that advocacy organisations face. Indeed such constraints exist within every sector of society in this increasingly homogenous world which requires faster and faster responses to unfolding events.

With the supersonic expansion rate of information, information and more information, media, governments and people respond with an increasingly short attention span. Economics pervades all aspects of society, forcing us to quantify the unquantifiable and ensure that we remain results-oriented, profit driven and highly competitive.

Advocacy organisations have grown and adapted themselves to these changes, mobilising people faster, raising more and more money and creating systems to respond quicker.

I really do think however, that the future does not lie in such adaptation; it lies in the resistance to them.

[Photo from Neha Erasmus]