A complex knot of concerns

What over 100 interviews with human rights activists tell us about their priorities for adaptation.

Last month, we wrote about a human rights ecosystem undergoing seismic change and highlighted three areas where practitioners believe adaptation is most urgently needed: building political power, adapting organizing models, and reconnecting with people. Those findings emerged from interviews we conducted as part of the Mapping Adaptation Project (MAP).

We have also been working on the Medusa Project. Through that, we spoke with disability rights activists, many working at the intersection of rights spaces, about the infrastructure their movement needs in this moment. Across the two efforts we completed 104 interviews with 110 practitioners in more than 30 countries: from international organizations to national groups and grassroots networks, from funders and academics to artists and independent experts. Altogether, the interviews gave us both a wide view of the concerns running across the ecosystem and a closer view from parts of it that are often marginalized.

We wondered if the three priority areas held. They do. Each set of interviews, analyzed on its own, produces a similar list of priority concerns. Taken together, they helped us understand not only what the priorities for adaptation are but how they are interconnected, and why there is no easy way forward.

Interconnected challenges

Nobody we spoke with was concerned only about a single issue. Seven concerns emerged across the interviews. Four focused externally on the power landscape: multilateral power, political power, economic power, and people power. And three looked internally at the infrastructure for organizing: information ecosystem, organizing models, and resourcing models. The typical interviewee raised five of the seven, but three issues came up more consistently: building political power, reconnecting with people, and adapting organizing models.

What we heard most was deep concern about the tangling of these issues. All but one interview mixed external concerns about the power landscape with internal concerns about the infrastructure for organizing. As one activist noted when we presented our findings, “it seems to me that the top three issues, political power, new organizing models, and people power, and even the one on resources, they’re all very connected to each other.” Activists talked about organizing models that rely on staff with deep professional expertise who can engage with policy makers but are unable to persuade people in their communities about rights issues. They worried about donor priorities that increasingly require less political engagement rather than more.

We believe that this interconnectedness matters for how activists respond. In our view, the three issues are less a menu to choose from than three points of entry into a complex knot.

Building political power

For an ecosystem in which many organizations have long sought to remain apolitical, the directness of the call for political engagement was striking. Activists described a backlash against democratic institutions and processes, and several people warned that the political neutrality many activists have maintained has become a structural weakness. They pointed to a changing political culture, where information is highly contested and polarized. Naming and shaming, or bringing truth to power, has limited purchase against governments that feel no shame.

What we heard was a call to move from defense to offense: toward propositional politics that shape political imagination, engage electoral and legislative arenas, and help leaders deliver on concrete rights benchmarks. One practitioner summarized it as the need for “a political ground game.”

The interviews that went furthest were the ones describing what this looks like in practice. One organization moved from monitoring protests to calling them. It also began drafting bills and working with political parties to adopt pieces of them as their own. We also heard about an organization’s work supporting community members to run for office. Over three years, the number of candidates from its community grew from single digits to well over a thousand, and the number elected to national office doubled. Political parties began to engage differently with that community, recognizing it as a holder of political power.

These examples raise important questions for the human rights ecosystem. Can activists be political without becoming partisan? Some go a step further, asking whether remaining non-partisan is even appropriate in contexts where political actors are advocating authoritarian and anti-rights positions. And what would political engagement strategies require of the more traditional work and capacities of rights activists? What everyone seemed to agree on, however, is that remaining above politics while politics is redrawn around them is not a viable option.

Reconnecting with people

Although deeper solidarity and better communications have long been shared priorities, many activists now describe a more urgent structural concern. We heard repeatedly how rights organizations focus on siloed issues with narrow, often specialized, audiences and struggle to persuade and engage people beyond them.

Activists described the fragmentation in different ways, pointing to multiple causes and effects. Many organizations have focused on single-issue campaigns that appeal to very narrow parts of a wider community. One interviewee explained that the information ecosystem reinforces silos, because the way we tag, sort, and search information is built around them. Another explained that rights organizations are still relying on outdated channels, formats, and technical language that speak to specific audiences but fail to build and engage constituencies actively in their work. And what we heard again and again is that while information and organizations are structured around single issues, people’s lives are not.

The interviews that went furthest described what building connections with the public looks like. One interviewee explained how their organization is trying to engage young influencers from their communities who are building real followings in challenging contexts. These influencers do not see themselves as activists and do not rely on the kind of human rights language NGOs use, but they have the capacity to connect with people traditional NGOs do not. Another organization, working to reach beyond its own constituency, partners with activists engaging communities across rights silos. It even acts as a re-granter, moving money to this cross-movement work that would otherwise fall between funding categories.

Across our interviews, activists raised important questions about what building people power means in practice. What would it mean to focus on persuading people and engaging them in the work of rights? Can rights activists build organizations and movements that are more porous and make space for people who do not see themselves as activists or who do not share all their views? And how do leaders balance running an organization with serving a wider movement?

Adapting organizing models

The agility and capacity of the structures activists rely on to do their work were raised in every single conversation we had, without exception. No other issue had this unanimous attention.

The diagnosis across interviews was consistent: built for a different context, rights organizations are not fit for purpose in this moment. They were often built to do too much in-house and to do it narrowly, which discourages collaboration with others. They have become too rigid to pivot at the pace required. The result is a field increasingly focused on survival with too little bandwidth to learn and adapt. As one interviewee explained, there is “a massive disconnect between the sense in people’s hearts of what is needed in this moment and what their organizations are actually able to do.”

Activists were not asking for a better model. They asked instead not to be locked into one kind of structure. Again, the interviews that provided the most insight described what this looks like in practice. One community organization opted not to formalize immediately, instead focusing on engaging its constituency and building support for its work. It only registered when its finances grew large enough to warrant the structures that would ensure it remained accountable to its community and not just its donors. Another interviewee described organizations that have begun hosting some of each other’s operational functions, an arrangement resting on written agreement and trust. They are starting slowly, but they are already thinking about what other functions they might share.

Across our interviews, activists questioned whether adaptation would be enough. Many wondered how to make space for new kinds of structures given a shrinking funding base. How can activists foster agile models that support people rather than perpetuate structures? How do smaller collectives engage with larger organizations without being absorbed? What does accountability look like in a structure that is less hierarchical? And many activists asked who can accompany organizations through these transitions, when few have the change management tools and the moment leaves little room to think beyond survival.

Testing what comes next

One other area of near unanimity was that activists do not want more prescriptions. What we heard was not an ecosystem waiting for answers, but a field with sharp questions and an appetite to begin figuring out how to answer them. These questions are what the MAP Experimentation Cohorts are being built around. We are creating peer-learning spaces where activists can refine their ideas and test whether they have promise. Activists will have the opportunity to identify key assumptions, design low-cost, rapid experiments to examine them, and find out what might work and what might not. We want to test, learn, and iterate together so that we can begin to find our way forward from this tangled knot.

Several interviewees warned against nostalgia. What came before, they noted, was far from perfect for too many people. As one activist told us: “We need to dream bigger.”