Category: PhD thesis

Changing topics in year 5

My supervisors have been encouraging me to switch thesis topics. I find myself resisting because the proposed alternative topic has very little to do with the intersection between environmental and indigenous politics, which I judge to be the most important ongoing change in the contemporary politics of the United States and Canada.

At the same time, while I have made a significant effort to come to grips with indigenous politics in the context of climate change politics, I have also often felt contradicted and confused, unable to discern confidently which interpretation may be most robust and useful. It may well be that I just don’t know enough about them to make a PhD research project with that focus feasible to complete over the next two years.

If you look at my initial long proposal and my subsequent shorter proposal, you can see a few of the reasons why I think this intersection is so interesting and important.

I’m still thinking it through.

Writing my first book

Nothing about my PhD so far has been easy. As long-time readers may recall, my first comprehensive exam was only passed after two attempts and a lot of effort. The strike was painful, and has made me particularly question the quality of undergraduate education that U of T provides, in terms of class and tutorial sizes, the selection of professors, and support for and integration of teaching assistants into the learning process. I am now edging toward a formal research proposal for departmental approval and ethics review.

I originally wrote a longer document which talked more about methodology and many other things, but my supervisor encouraged me to write something more concise with the essential features of the proposed research project.

The plan now is to make sure the short document is a plausible nucleus for a successful PhD, including through a presentation to a brown bag lunch at the U of T Environmental Governance Lab on October 27th; to incorporate what has been left out in the older longer proposal; and to seek departmental and ethical approval before beginning first round remote interviews.

My supervisor has intelligently cautioned me about seeking too many critiques of these documents – a factor which has complicated and delayed my efforts so far, and which may be drawn from my experience as a civil servant. I have also been warned by Peter Russell that I am starting to write my thesis in the form of the proposal. So no comments please, unless they are strictly limited and focused on the process for making this proposal viable.

Step by step toward a proposal

My PhD committee members probably feel like I have fallen off the face of the Earth.

Seemingly decades ago, my hope was to have my thesis proposal submitted for approval by December 2015. Now, I am getting close to the point where I think the draft will be worth circulating to committee members and potential supervisors.

While there are literally hundreds of tasks which I have listed for myself in completing the proposal, including reading many books and articles, there are three that I think I should push through before sending a preliminary version to my committee members, if only to show them that I am alive and working. I need to incorporate ideas from a qualitative methods course I completed, specifically concerning ethical approval. Then, I need to incorporate two sets of comments from my friends Nathan and Nada.

This project will involve a lot of challenges. Two that loom over me are getting it through ethical approval, given the way the communities opposing these pipelines are often vulnerable and specifically targeted by state security services, and actually finding people who were involved in fighting these pipelines who are willing to be interviewed.

One step at a time, I suppose.

Federal Court of Appeal overturns Northern Gateway Pipeline approval

The Federal Court of Appeal just ruled that the Canadian government had failed to adequately consult indigenous peoples and so quashed the 2014 federal approval for the project.

As one of the subjects of my PhD thesis, all developments on NGP are of great interest. It’s certainly a fast-moving as well as an important topic.

Is the Leap Manifesto at risk of easy reversal?

Today, Toronto350.org hosted a teach-in in preparation for the climate change consultations which the Trudeau government has asked MPs to hold.

Avi Lewis — co-creator of the Leap Manifesto — was on the panel. The question which I submitted through the commendable system of written cards (to avoid tedious speeches from the self-important audience members) wasn’t posed to the panel, but I did ask Mr. Lewis about it after.

Specifically, I raised the issue of progressive climate change policies being adopted by one government and removed or reversed by the next. How can we enact policies that can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and avoid being reversed when new governments take power, especially right-wing ones?

Mr. Lewis said that the climate movement doesn’t have an answer to this question.

He began by describing how the right wing in North America has been effective at creating mechanisms to lock in its own policies. Specifically, he cited the network of right-wing think tanks and multilateral trade agreements that constrain the policy options of future left-leaning governments. To this could be added some of Sylvia Bashevkin’s analysis of how centre-left governments like those of Clinton and Chretien adopted much of the thought of their right-wing predecessors.

I went on to contrast two potential approaches to success, the hope that a coalition of leftist forces can work together to achieve all of their objectives (which seemed the underlying logic of today’s event, and much other climate change organizing) and the approach embodied by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), in which they are strictly non-partisan and seek to become a trusted source of climate information for members of all political parties and adherents to all mainstream ideologies.

Mr. Lewis said that he saw little point in the CCL approach, in part because parties like the Republicans in the U.S. are so unreceptive. He also thought this approach has been tried unsuccessfully by the climate movement already, whereas major pressure from a left-wing coalition was novel and might be able to drive change in a government like Trudeau’s.

I remain skeptical about the idea that a coalition of the centre-to-far-left can achieve durable success on climate change. These are critical years in terms of blocking big new infrastructure projects, but solving climate change will ultimately require decades of belt-tightening and sacrifice. Conservatives need to be on board if we’re going to succeed, and tying climate change mitigation too tightly to other elements of the left-wing agenda could impede that. Hence my anxiety about non-strategic linkages with laudable but not critically connected causes, from LGBTQ rights to minimum wage policy to the conduct of police forces.

The big exception in my view is solidarity with indigenous peoples. Around the world, they are absolutely central to the process of shutting down fossil fuel development. In Canada, where the Trudeau government remains either clueless or in denial, they may also be the only ones with the legal power to stop the construction of fossil fuel production and transportation infrastructure that we will all regret.

Openness versus effectiveness in activist organizations

Occupy Wall Street comprised the people who responded to the call. Ultimately, however, uncritical openness was Occupy’s downfall: the general assemblies were paralyzed by the inability to distinguish between true and false. Participants who had been with Occupy for a day were given a say equal to that of committed activists who had founded the first encampments. In our fully horizontal social movement, no one had the authority to determine who ought to be expelled for being disruptive. Occupy faced adversaries inside and outside. Half wanted to destroy the movement, and the other half wanted to control it. Occupy never developed a way to vet participants. Anyone (worthy or unworthy) could claim to be an equal spokesperson of the movement. Thus the movement faced both police infiltrators who disrupted our assemblies with belligerence and the 99% Spring, an initiative financed by the progressive Left, that mimicked Occupy in a successful bid to dissipate the movement’s revolutionary momentum into a re-election campaign for President Obama.

White, Michah. The End of Protest. p. 112-3 (paperback)

Related:

White on the (constructive) failure of Occupy Wall Street

I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed undelying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but rather in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

White, Michah. The End of Protest. p. 27 (paperback)

Related:

Democracy within social justice movements

My friend Stu sent me a long article about the functioning of social justice movements of the Occupy / Arab Spring variety, discussing how their efforts at being internally democratic work.

Much of it is of interest, but this passage made me think of the climate movement especially:

When the anarchist participation prevented the Trotskyists, Real Democracy activists, and other grassroots politicians from producing the sort of unitary demands and manifestos that the general assembly had earlier vetoed, the Commission was broken up into a dozen sub-commissions. Every single day, in multiple sub-commissions, the grassroots politicians made the same proposals that had been defeated the day before, until one meeting when none of their opponents were present. The demands were passed through the commission and subsequently ratified by the general assembly, which ratified nearly every proposal passed before it.

Social movements suffer from extreme forms of some of the problems of traditional representational democracy. Participants lack training, time to do research, and support from experts. Procedures designed to (a) make good decisions (b) through participatory means are imperfect and often feel tedious and frustrating to participants. There is no ideal way to deal with situations where a plurality of people have reached general consensus, but smaller groups have principled and fundamental objections to the most favoured popular course.

“Grass on the other side is greener” thinking about democracy makes me wonder about alternatives like an agenda-setting vanguard or movements governed principally by a charismatic leader. As I have argued before, the virtue of democracy is more in mandating restraint than in necessarily making good decisions.

That might be as good as we can do when it comes to governing nation states. Whether popular movements pursuing environmental or social justice objectives can do better is an open question.

Metrics of activist success

The fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is still dealing with the disappointment of President Gertler announcing such an uninspiring response to the social injury and financial risk associated with fossil fuel investments.

One early response from the campaign was to hold a creative direct action outside Simcoe Hall, home to the Office of the President and the Governing Council.

The action made me think about different ways in which acts undertaken to provoke social or political change can be evaluated. At least two possibilities come to mind: evaluation in terms of the subjective experience of participants, and evaluation in terms of the effect on the thinking or behaviour of the mass public or elite decision-makers.

Subjective experiences (AKA “feelings”) are not trivial. I think the biggest challenge activist groups face is maintaining the health and motivation of their members and key organizers. Indeed, when it comes to big marches like the People’s Climate March and March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate I have reached the conclusion that they are more important in terms of energizing participants than in terms of changing public opinion. Not least, this is because the media tends to wildly under-report them.

That being said, I think activism by definition is an effort to change how the world works and that doing that requires changing the thinking and behaviour of the mass public and decision-makers. To be effective in that, we need to think hard about why people believe what they believe and make the choices they make, and what kinds of interventions can change those things. As activists resolutely focused on achieving positive change, we need to focus on producing good outcomes which would not have happened without us.

From the second perspective, I am less confident about how productive the action outside Simcoe Hall was. For the random student wandering by – or the random administrator listening through their window – did it improve the odds of them supporting fossil fuel divestment? The more militant members of the campaign often talk about “building power”, but we ultimately cannot force the administration to do anything. We need to convince them, which takes us back to serious strategic thinking about how to change the beliefs and behaviours of non-activists.

Managing volunteers

I am finding myself frustrated with the primary challenge associated with trying to produce political change using groups of volunteers, which I would judge to be maintaining accountability and motivation. If the groups aspire to be democratic, that brings a set of challenges too. (The third biggest challenge is probably avoiding and managing interpersonal conflicts.) Still, I think the greatest challenge is the tendency of volunteers to abandon projects half-finished and informally vacate positions of responsibility which they have sought (without handing them over to others in an effective way).

One potential solution is to move from volunteers to employees. This arguably gives you more oversight, perhaps makes them feel more responsible, and allows those who couldn’t normally afford to work so much for free the opportunity to pay their rent, etc. There are lots of effective staff-run NGOs (from the Pembina Institute to Environmental Defence), and taking on a few staff is often an aspiration for any serious group.

Regardless, most people who contribute their labour to grassroots-style environmental groups do so as volunteers, and it’s the effective or ineffective recruitment, retention, and management of volunteers that largely determines an organization’s effectiveness. The other main factor is the competence of key organizers, who must themselves be recruited, retained, and managed.

It’s often tempting to imagine a group in which all members are and remain strongly committed, and who manifest that commitment in consistent and professional work. It’s certainly logically possible that a group could have rules and a formal structure that encourages participation of this sort and diverts the less committed to other organizations that are also doing good work. Such a group could limit the amount of resources that need to be devoted to fundraising, and avoid the hassles, limitations, and democratic challenges of formal incorporation.

The time commitments would have to be manageable – to limit the main problem that afflicts key organizers.

Another question is how to effectively brand such a group and define its role. Being independent would cost the support of organizations with pre-existing name recognition and bases of support, but it would also allow for more of an experimental structure.