2.1 Defining policy advocacy

The most basic meaning of advocacy is to represent, promote, or defend some person(s), interest, or opinion. Such a broad idea encompasses many types of activities such as rights’ representation¹ and social marketing², but the focus of this manual is on the approaches adopted by organizations and coalitions in trying to change or preserve specific government programs, that is, approaches focused on influencing decisions of public policy. In order to distinguish this from other types of advocacy activities, it is often referred to as “policy advocacy.” This is also the term we use throughout the guide to make this distinction clear.

There are many definitions of policy advocacy available from multiple authors and perspectives³. At their core are a number of ideas that continually come up, characterizing policy advocacy as follows:

• a strategy to affect policy change or action — an advocacy effort or campaign is a structured and sequenced plan of action with the purpose to start, direct, or prevent a specific policy change.

• a primary audience of decision makers — the ultimate target of any advocacy effort is to influence those who hold decision-making power. In some cases, advocates can speak directly to these people in their advocacy efforts; in other cases, they need to put pressure on these people by addressing secondary audiences (for example, their advisors, the media, the public).

• a deliberate process of persuasive communication — in all activities and communication tools, advocates are trying to get the target audiences to understand, be convinced, and take ownership of the ideas presented. Ultimately, they should feel the urgency to take action based on the arguments presented.

• a process that normally requires the building of momentum and support behind the proposed policy idea or recommendation. Trying to make a change in public policy is usually a relatively slow process as changing attitudes and positions requires ongoing engagement, discussion, argument, and negotiation.

• conducted by groups of organied citizens—normally advocacy efforts are carried out by organizations, associations, or coalitions represent the interests or positions of certain populations, but an individual may, of course, spearhead the effort.

However, taking these basic elements outlined above a little further and emphasizing the specific challenge that we develop in this chapter, our definition is as follows:

Policy advocacy is the process of negotiating and mediating a dialogue through which influential networks, opinion leaders, and ultimately, decisionmakers take ownership of your ideas, evidence, and proposals, and subsequently act upon them.

In our definition, we place a great emphasis on the idea of the transfer of ownership of core ideas and thinking. In essence, this implies preparing decision makers and opinion leaders for the next policy window or even pushing them to open one in order to take action. If advocates do their job well, decision makers will take the ideas that have been put forward and make changes to the current policy approach in line with that thinking.

Putting the definition another way may be even more striking: your policy advocacy campaign has been successful when politicians present your ideas, analysis, and proposals as their own and do not mention you! For those who come from an academic background, this is often a bitter pill to swallow, but the good news is that it will be no secret where the ideas originated. All those in the policy network close to the decision will know where the idea came from and you will, in fact, be engaged to do further work as your reputation is enhanced. From the practical political position, decision makers have to present policy changes as their own, as they are the ones taking a risk on actually delivering the policy change, have to sell the ideas to build the needed support for their proposal, and ultimately will pay the price if it fails.

Through this focus on mediation, negotiation and ownership, it could be inferred in our definition that we are only talking about a collaborative working relationship between parties involved in the process and that more confrontational approaches such as whistleblowing, watchdogging, or strategic litigation would not be covered under such a definition. However, it is our contention that such advocacy approaches are what negotiators call a “high opening position” and when following such a strong opening of an advocacy process, there is still a long way to go before actual policy change will be delivered to ensure that such victories or exposure of policy failures are not just given lip service by governments. Delivering on such victories still takes a process of building broad ownership of a new system that, for example, does not infringe on the rights of a certain population.