Engagement between UK NGOs and social movements on climate and environmentalism

Summary (no more than 500 words) I will investigate the nature of UK NGOs' engagement with social movements in light of new waves of civic activism in the UK. Through semi-structured interviews, co-creation workshops, and secondary data collection, I will explore the following research questions:

How and why do UK NGOs and UK social movements engage with each other? What effects do these engagements have on policy processes?
How have the practices of NGOs and their engagement strategies changed since the wave of civic activism in 2011?

I developed this research proposal based on my current professional position as Oxfam who, along with many other NGOs, has committed to closer partnership with informal civil society groups in the UK and around the world. Yet, as I've witnessed first-hand, NGOs often have a strained or even combative relationship with informal movements.

An initial review of the literature shows pro-democracy movements of the Arab Spring and anti-austerity and anti-capitalist movements from 2011 garnered wide attention and sparked a broad literature. This included examinations of protestors' demands and aspirations (Calhoun 2013; Kaldor and Selchow 2012), similarities and differences from previous waves of activism (Calhoun, 1993; Cammaerts 2021; Togral, 2016), and their utilisation of new communication networks and social media platforms (Castells, 2012). An important aspect of so-called 'new-new social movements' is their practice of prefigurative politics, that is the notion, rooted in anarchist thought, that rather than simply protesting against a dominant regime, activists are "perform[ing] their vision of a 'better world' to come" (Jeffery and Dyson, 2020). For progressive movements this means, for example, adopting a leaderless or less hierarchical structure, and making greater use of direct action and new forms of contestation and disruption (Cammaerts, 2021).

An important, yet under researched, area relates to what this new activism, including more prefigurative forms of action, means for formal civil society actors, including NGOs, which are traditionally more institutionalised. How are NGOs, in particular, responding to these more fluid practices?

I focus on the UK as it is a particularly interesting and timely context for research. Climate change is a prominent political issue in the UK and, while the UK has one of the most established civil societies in the world - there are concerns that UK civic space is newly under threat. Exploring what the changing nature of civic space in the UK means for NGO/movement relations will be a timely and original contribution to the literature. I also expect my findings to be of relevance to stakeholders beyond the UK. Most of the NGOs listed above operate in multiple countries and activism and social movements are also increasingly international in scope.