Lesson 1 - Take back the agenda to ‘change the weather’

 

Essence

Create and drive a new narrative space on civil society to change the debate, and ultimately favourably change attitudes, rather than staying stuck in countering existing anti-CSO narratives.

 

Insight

Given the personal and reputational nature of common civic space attacks, there is an understandable tendency for those targeted to be angry and adopt a communications strategy focused on defending their reputation by countering defaming and vilifying narratives. While such responses are necessary for CSO actors to defend themselves in public and mobilise supporters, they are normally not sufficient to ensure support and to favourably shift broader public attitudes about the civil society sector. 

The theory and practice of framing shows that solely negating the opposition means you are trapped in their narrative and in the end, they are the ones setting the agenda1 . For example, if you focus on continually arguing that your CSO is NOT a ‘foreign agent’, you are keeping the accusation on the agenda and for many people, the foreign agent frame is all they will hear or remember and actually end up associating this with you! By focusing on countering the attack narrative, you are in essence playing the game on the opposition field, rather than proactively leading from the front.

In order to take back the agenda and create a broader narrative space, it is also vital to invest in steering the public debate more favourably towards CSOs. Leading with your values and building presence of the stories you want to tell serves to set a different and more positive agenda and rebalances the debate, i.e. change the weather. This idea of leading the debate from the front is also one of our guiding principles on effective strategic communications. 

 

Cases

 - Kazakhstan - A national CSO coalition worked to rebalance the public debate on civil society after burdensome reporting obligations and heavy tax restrictions on foreign funding were introduced in 2015, together with strong accusatory narratives about CSOs (e.g. that they’re “grant eaters” serving foreign interests). The CSOs involved also identified the danger of even stronger restrictions to come. So, the coalition developed a narrative change campaign, #Azamatbol  (‘Good Citizen’)2 to start a preventative response and change the weather away from stories of Western meddling and foreign agendas and onto the contribution of CSOs to shared goals and aspirations of all citizens, such as supporting local communities and groups in need. A series of tests showed that these agenda setting messages and stories proved effective in significantly shifting public attitudes in the positive direction.
See Advocacy Cases Section 6 for more detail and background on this case.

 

Action

  • Start well before a crisis as a pre-emptive strike: It’s relatively easy to identify the kind of political leadership that would attempt to shrink civic space. So, even if they are not currently in government, you can basically be sure that attacks on CSOs will be embedded in their political agenda. A close monitoring of political discourse, parties’ manifestos, events etc. should be enough to see the threat posed, build support and get started working on safeguarding and promoting public trust in the sector. Presenting this as a preventative longer-term intervention will help in building your coalition and get started on this communications work in quieter times (See more on a proactive communications strategy in Section 5).

 

  • Invest the time needed for the narrative and story development process: Before taking the work to scale, it’s a good idea to look at your work through the lens of the unifying narratives in your strategy (See Lesson 5) and start seeing stories in your everyday work, including with partners and beneficiaries of your work. In this way, you can build up a bank of stories to have at hand for use in campaigning. Many resources exist to provide guidance on process and practical tools, including our resources.

 

What you can get wrong

  • Waiting until an attack is launched before starting to build support for this communications work: the work of coalition building and securing funding for such a communications effort takes time, and it’s wise to invest in this as an ongoing activity to ensure your response is timely. See our 10 keys on mobilising strategic communications coalitions for guidance. For example, Key 1 urges coalitions to “Seek unity, not uniformity”, meaning that while members should agree on an overall narrative strategy, members also need to be allowed space to message in ways that is authentic and honest for them.

 

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