I'd been thinking very much the same recently, and how many tricks the movement is missing.

I started writing a blog about what EA could learn from Management Science/Operational Research - a field that is essentially EA without the A. It's all about effective, rational decision making and has developed a wide array of tools for tackling 'how'.

As a consequence, it often feels to me that EA is where Management Science was in the 60s with regards tools and lenses, and debates. Those have now long subsided. Trying to cover 50-60 years of a field's voultion meant what was meant to be a short blog quickly became quite a burgeoning essay - I'll get back to it.

Although the tools of Management Science are of immediate use, it's actually the lenses and frameworks that have more value. Frames on pluralism, systems, emergence, reductionism, epistemology, and interpretism, even its critical turn in the 90s.

Separately, a great project management book that might interest you is 'How Big Things Get Done'. Bent Flyjberg's ideas of reference classes would be of especial interest to EAs, as well as much of his other writing on risk, power, rationality and the scientific method.

I’d add that Historically most funding for animal rights has come from non vegans. Indeed most campaigning has too.

The funding element is probably still true today of the U.K. grassroots. Most legacy organisations in the U.K. like The League Against Cruel Sports, Animal Aid, CIWF, NAVS, maybe Peta are primarily still funded by non vegans. Indeed many of those orgs have a strategic comms dilemma not to alienate those ‘rights’ donors with the vegan message.

We ourselves raised £30k seed funding for our org from someone who owned a dairy farm. He was looking for an org with a bold, abolitionist strategy. I liberation pledged our lunch together and rather than pushback got an acknowledgment of the congruence of the pledge. So we don’t need to water down the message even, but be judicious and skilful.

Again, The Daily Mail has run plenty of pro Vegan and pro animal press over the years, as well as plenty of reactionary stuff. Indeed they ran a positive double page spread in the early days of Animal Rebellion - I was floored by both the quality and length of the article. Again, the previous day they’d run an almost equally long scaremongering article. But they are available to us.

It’s true that we won’t win animal liberation with only the people resource of today. Like all movements the vanguard has to engage the moveable middle and work across the spectrum of allies. Animal eating people care about animals too, as all those grassroots activists of the 1960-2000s demonstrate. Out there on cold wet winter days protesting fox hunting, vivisection and live export whilst eating bacon sandwiches.

There’s a large literature on how to engage across the spectrum, with the Freedom to Marry and Together for Yes campaigns both being particularly good recent exemplars. You can tap into people’s shared aspirational values to foster alignment and support without succumbing to an undermining or adversarial message and set of values.

Let’s inform ourselves by that body of knowledge to both fundraise and campaign in an effective manner rather than ignore more than a century of social movement thinking.

So yes, I’d agree, there’s certainly better informed, less risky, more holistically congruent and effective comms strategies available to us.
 

The work we do at Animal Think Tank came from this kind of thinking. So it’d be great if the post brings more people and organizations along with these types of ideas.

A key difficulty of course is in designing ‘visionary pragmatism’. Let alone building the movement ecosystem, infrastructure and capacity to execute it.

After much time we have our own version in draft as a result of the research whose methodology you cite. A mix of increasing political representation, clustering thin rights, and the symbolic abolition of nominal property status.

Conceptualising visionary work is always long, slow, and hard. When I worked in the mega project industry the standard was to invest 3% of total resources of a project in the conceptualising and defining stage - not planning, but pre planning!

Bringing a new market category forward like a visionary objective, rather than a campaign within an existing category, is equivalent. It can take years.

It requires the construction of a new ecosystem and infrastructure.

For anyone interested in trying to putting visionary pragmatism into practice, then follow our work at Animal Think Tank - we’ll be releasing more and more this coming year of the culmination of our thinking on legislative, legal, narrative, mobilising and movement strategy towards institutionalising animal rights.