Introduction
Social change is a complex and nonlinear process that requires sustained effort, collaboration, and perseverance to overcome various barriers and challenges. It is often slow but can be radical in its long-term impact, highlighting the importance of patience, persistence, and collective action in effecting meaningful transformation.
People engaged in social change tend to be highly motivated to shift problems that are causing real harm to people and the environment.
The slow pace of change can feel frustrating and demoralising. At times it can feel that action is futile and projects are failing. With perspective it’s possible to reframe that view: noticing the myriad positive ripples that come from individual and collective action.
Freedom isn’t won in a day. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted over a year. It took over a decade for India’s nonviolent movement, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, to end British rule. It took 10 years for Serbian activists to oust the brutal dictator Slobodan Milosevic. – Daniel Hunter, Source
Below are snippets of resources to explore around time, slow change and the concept of failure in social change.
Explore Resources
Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Slow Change Can Be Radical Change” explores the idea that societal transformation often occurs gradually, despite the expectation for quick results. She argues that the true power for change lies in grassroots movements, campaigns, and ordinary people who persistently advocate for their ideals over time. Rebecca emphasizes the importance of taking a long-term perspective to recognize the influence of these movements, even when their impact may not be immediately apparent.
A common source of uninformed despair is when a too-brief effort doesn’t bring a desired result—one round of campaigning, one protest. – Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca illustrates her point by referencing the example of the Sunrise Movement and their advocacy for the Green New Deal, showing how their efforts influenced political discourse and policy decisions over several years. She suggests that focusing solely on short-term outcomes, such as legislative victories, overlooks the broader impact of movements in shifting societal norms and possibilities.
The short-term version gives you politicians giving us nice things. The long-term version shows you movements shifting what’s considered possible, reasonable, and necessary, setting the stage and creating the pressure for these events, offering a truer analysis of power. – Rebecca Solnit
The essay challenges the notion that slow change implies acceptance of the status quo, asserting instead that it requires steadfast commitment to achieving meaningful progress. She advocates for embracing a “slow lane” approach to activism, which involves pacing oneself, listening to diverse voices, and building inclusive movements for lasting change.
At the end of most positive political changes, a powerful person or group seems to hand down a decision. But at the beginning of most were grassroots campaigns to make it happen. The change got handed up before it got handed down, and only the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception. – Rebecca Solnit
Movement Success, Durability and Research with Winnifred Louis (Commons Conversations Podcast)
…there’s three timeframes that people need to distinguish which aren’t just short, medium, and long. Because things that work in the short term, often fail in the longer term. And things that are effective in the longer term sometimes have very odd or confusing effects in the short term, and different audiences and different goals. – Winnifred Louis
So the three other goals that we thought of that are important, are sustaining commitment to the movement over time and in the face of failure, because a lot of policy changes that are really important, like the transition to a decarbonized economy, they actually take decades. And so it’s a very long term goal. And when we look at the vote for women, for example, that that struggle took centuries in the West, and in some places, it’s still, you know, ongoing today. So sustaining commitment and overtime and in the face of failure. – Winnifred Louis
Explore More Research by Winnifred Louis
- Episode 3 – What is successful collective action?
In Episode 3, we talk about the way that collective action works across short, medium, and long-term time frames; for audiences of self, supporters, opponents, bystanders, and third parties; and with seven key outcomes for both mobilisation (raising awareness, building sympathy, generating intentions, and evoking action) and persisting to power (sustaining commitment in the longer term, building coalitions, and avoiding counter-mobilisation). - Episode 4 – How to empower people to act
In Episode 4, we talk about conversations that empower people to act by managing their expectations, being clear about your theory of how change happens, and communicating what needs to happen and the momentum that’s building in your movement. You can help to create change by being clear on specific actions that people can take in a time frame that people understand. This will show them how to achieve the change they want. - Episode 7 – How Protest Changes After Failure
In Episode 7, Prof. Winnifred Louis talks about using the DIME model of responses to the failure of protest to understand how tactics evolve towards different outcomes: Disidentification and walking away; Innovation (which can include radicalisation and deradicalisation); Moralisation (growing moral conviction and urgency) and Energisation (redoubled efforts).
Surviving the Ups and Downs of Social Movements
Bill Moyer saw patterns in widespread discouragement in social movements. His model for understanding social change, the Movement Action Plan, factored in perception of failure, providing insights and hope for navigating the up and downs in social movements.
He noticed every movement has peaks and valleys and ups and downs. Even after a really exciting moment of power, there’s often a crash afterwards where it feels like nothing’s working anymore. Moyer also noticed that a big moment is typically followed with the feeling of activist failure. He saw this pattern over and over again in social movements. – Source
It is grounding for young activists to see that these patterns have always been there, and it doesn’t mean that it’s over when things are slower. It may be a time to regroup and think together and reorganize. But that doesn’t mean that the fight is over or hopeless. – Source
Mark and Paul Engler explain Moyer’s model in the following two articles.
Surviving the ups and downs of social movements
Those who get involved in social movements share a common experience: Sometimes, when an issue captures the public eye or an unexpected event triggers a wave of mass protest, there can be periods of intense activity, when new members rush to join the cause and movement energy swells.
But these extraordinary times are often followed by long, fallow stretches when activists’ numbers dwindle and advocates struggle to draw any attention at all. During these lulls, those who have tasted the euphoria of a peak moment feel discouraged and pessimistic. The ups and downs of social movements can be hard to take. – Mark and Paul Engler
Surviving the ups and downs of Social Movements: The Perception of Failure (Part 2)
Moyer’s theory of change, based on the idea of winning majority support, rests on a different set of suppositions. In the MAP model, long stretches of time can pass where little seems to change. Even as they slowly accumulate popular sympathy, movements may lack any real traction in the halls of power. But once public opinion tips, the floodgates of change can open. – Mark and Paul Engler
“Over the years… the weight of massive public opposition, along with the defection of many elites, takes its toll,” Moyer explains. Movement activists may have been told for as long as they could remember that their demands were naive and politically impractical. But once majority support for their position is firmly established, this starts to change, sometimes abruptly.
The limits of the possible can be redefined — as they were with civil rights in the 1960s, or with the call to phase out nuclear power in 1980s, or with gay marriage in recent years. – Mark and Paul Engler
“The long-term impact of social movements,” Moyer contends in a sentence that would be heretical in conventional political circles, “is more important than their immediate material success.”
The idea of winning over majority public support creates a metric by which activists can judge where they stand in the MAP model — and this sets Moyer’s framework apart from other, more amorphous accounts of movement cycles. In the MAP’s early stages, during the initial ripening of conditions around an issue, less than 30 percent of the population might agree with a movement’s insistence that the status quo must change. As activists ramp up protest, greater segments of the public become aware of the problem at hand, and successful movements push levels of sympathy toward the 50 percent mark. Only after they pass this threshold does the endgame of a movement begin. At that point, change agents can shift their focus from demonstrating that a problem exists to advocating for alternatives — and they can start seeing these alternatives adopted in mainstream politics.
Stage Six: Majority Public Support
Image – Making Change: What Works Report, p.36, based on Bill Moyer’s work.
Explore Stage Six of Moyer’s Model.
The movement must consciously undergo a transformation from spontaneous protest, operating in a short-term crisis, to a long-term popular struggle to achieve positive social change. It needs to win over the neutrality, sympathies, opinions, and even support of an increasingly larger majority of the populace and involve many of them in the process of opposition and change. – Mark and Paul Engler
The central agency of opposition must slowly change from the new wave activists and groups to the great majority of nonpolitical populace, the PPOs, and the mainstream political forces as they are convinced to agree with the movement’s position. The majority stage is a long process of eroding the social, political, and economic supports that enable the powerholders to continue their policies.
It is a slow process of social transformation that create a new social and political consensus, reversing those of normal times. – Mark and Paul Engler
The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down
Read this Open Letter to Civic Society Organizations and Activists Working for a ‘Better’ World. This article is co-authored by Bayo Akomolafe and Marta Benavides. Bayo is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action, activism and social change. He is an international speaker, poet and activist for a radical paradigm shift in consciousness and current ways of living.
…our times are probably more urgent than when people first began to protest these ‘injustices’ – but today gifts us with the appreciation of a different kind of urgency, one which comes from the realization that the system is not the cause of our problems, it is a consequence of our separation from each other. It is a consequence of our complicity with our own destruction. In other words, we are the system we fight against. This is why we think that the current paradigm of protests, branding and volunteerism will not address the deep substructures of experience that need to shift. We must go deeper…a lot deeper than merely protesting the status quo. – Bayo Akomolafe
This is not about conventional movements. We envision a meta-network, a new politics of engagement that draws in the non-activist and activist and helps them recognize the power they already are…It is no longer time to rush through the contested world blinded by fury and anger – however worthwhile these are. Now, we think, is the time to ‘retreat’ into the real work of reclamation, to re-member again our humanity through the intimacy of our relationships. The time is very urgent – we must slow down. – Bayo Akomolafe
The Slow Lane: Why Quick Fixes Fail and How to Achieve Real Change
Society celebrates leaders who promise fast, easy solutions to the world’s problems–but quick fixes are just mirages that fade, leaving us with the same broken systems. The truth is, effective social change happens through slow, intentional actions. – Sascha Haselmayer
Using dozens of examples – prison reform in England, urban development in Venezuela, healthcare in the Navajo Nation, early childhood education in New York, and many more – The Slow Lane shows how, by following the principles taught in this book, readers can create lasting change.
- Slow Lane Principle #1: Hold the urgency.
- Slow Lane Principle #2: Listen.
- Slow Lane Principle #3: Share the agency
- Slow Lane Principle #4: Nurture Curiosity
- Slow Lane Principle #5: Use Technology as an Enabler
For more:
In the case of climate, it’s been 60 years and a lot of fast lane messages, yet progress has been tough and polarizing – and I say this with a lot of respect for everyone trying. I guess what I’m proposing here is that we just try to trust a different approach that’s less about winning at all costs and more about bringing everyone along for the ride. What we see is that the result is often more resilient and enduring. – Sascha Haselmayer, Source
Take same-sex couples in the ’70s asking for marriage licenses. What an audacious idea at the time – an idea that grew, with participation, and sparked a global movement. Forty-five years later, we see marriage equality in the U.S. and today in many more countries. No venture capitalist would’ve placed a bet on that becoming a reality, yet people who lived the reality stepped up. They wanted to correct the injustice, imagine a new future – not just for themselves, but for everyone. They took the long view and built an inclusive movement that led to a new norm. – Sascha Haselmayer, Source
With slow lane principles, the key question here is, how do I respond in a moment of crisis? Do I shut everyone out and just dictate what needs to happen, or can I learn new behaviors, bring others in, and create a way forward together? Then you have two steps. The first is learning how to hold the urgency and not jump into immediate action. The second is to use that time to find out who you should listen to, and whose voice you might not be hearing yet. – Sascha Haselmayer, Source
Why Social Change is Slow
Without collective action, social change will be slow. This video by the Prosocial Progress Foundation includes material adapted from a 2017 interview with the filmmaker Adam Curtis.
Changing systems can be slow — and maybe it should be
At the Ashoka Changemaker Summit, women and queer entrepreneurs share wisdom for changing systems, shifting mindsets, and healing.
We must recognize that change takes time and resist Western ideals of speed and efficiency. We must center and start systems work in the communities who are living and experiencing harmful systems. And we must create time, space, and context to work across differences. – Source
Toward a Psychology of Social Change: A Typology of Social Change
This paper defines a typology of social change which includes four social contexts: Stability, Inertia, Incremental Social Change and Dramatic Social Change (DSC). Four characteristics of DSC were further identified: the pace of social change, rupture to the social structure, rupture to the normative structure, and the level of threat to one’s cultural identity. A theoretical model that links the characteristics of social change together and with the social contexts is also suggested.
Social change happens very slowly, and then all at once, because there are tipping points in social beliefs. This paper found that when 25% of people shared a new norm, this could trigger a tipping point to change the consensus of the entire population. – Ethan Mollick
Explore Further
- Movements and leaders have seasons – it’s important to know which one you are in
- What is a Social Movement? Social Movement Definitions
- The Four Roles of Social Activism by Bill Moyer
- Prefigurative Politics in Practice
- 10 Great Resources on Activist Wellbeing
- Resources to Cope With Climate Anxiety and Grief
- How do we Encourage Activists to Celebrate Wins and come back from Losses?
- Activist Support and Debriefing
- How Healthy Campaigns Respond in the Face of Bad News
- What we can Learn from the Marriage Equality Campaign
- From Little Things Big Things Grow: Events That Changed Australia