Be more radical in seeking change, says outgoing ActionAid director

BRUSSELS — Are NGOs in Brussels radical enough? Not just in their attempts to alter legislation as it winds through the European Union’s lawmaking process, but in seeking systemic change? “Not enough by half,” according to NGO leader Laura Sullivan. A few days after stepping down as regional director for Europe and the Americas at ActionAid — a charity she has worked with for a decade — the 38-year-old Irish native met with Devex to distill how she thinks civil society groups can maximize their impact in the EU. “We focus so much on the [policy and lawmaking] institutions, without thinking about what Greenpeace calls ‘mind bombing’: changing the received understanding of how things are and chipping away at those narratives.” In the 16 years Sullivan has been in Brussels, she said NGOs have begun to “chip away” at ideas such as the primacy of economic growth, or the ability of free trade to tackle poverty. But she argued they should do more of this — “shifting the narrative, mobilizing masses of people” — rather than seeking to “change a percentage or a word in a passage of a legal document, as influential and impactful as that might be.” Her own proudest moment during her time with ActionAid was the No Food for Fuel campaign; not for the changes it achieved to EU legislation on biofuels — which NGOs feared was leading to land grabs in developing countries — but for “the impact on the narrative.” “It really went from ‘biofuels as this answer to climate change’ to ‘hang on a second, this is a bit dodgy. We shouldn’t be using land and playing with food prices in order to produce fuel.’” The key, she said, was linking “the problem of Europe’s consumption in relation to rights violations elsewhere.” As part of the success in getting the message across, she credits a savvy lobbying strategy, with a coalition of NGOs each playing to their strengths. “ActionAid was doing a load of mobilization of people in countries asking, ‘do you accept this?’ Transport & Environment was doing a lot of the insider lobbying with the European Commission. Greenpeace was doing some of the really good policy pieces.” The coalition had very little funding, “but did really well because we pulled together our resources that we already had extremely well. We found ways to work so that we didn’t completely lose our identity, but we were prepared nonetheless not to put our logos first, and that really does matter.” “We are concerned that aid is completely losing its central purpose. It’s got to be linked to poverty eradication and fighting inequality, and that definition is fast being blurred.” --— Laura Sullivan, former regional director at ActionAid Funding pressures Sullivan also spoke of the increasingly squeezed funding environment that European NGOs are working in. The European Commission’s desire to work with large NGOs in consortia has fueled concern that smaller organizations won’t be able to find their “point of entry,” she said. At the same time, the financial crisis has hit smaller donors, while national aid budgets are raided to cover the costs of migration and border security. “We are concerned that aid is completely losing its central purpose,” Sullivan said. “It’s got to be linked to poverty eradication and fighting inequality, and that definition is fast being blurred.” “Some of the squeezing of the funding has a positive effect because it forces coalitions. But a lot more of it will simply squeeze out entirely the smaller operators, and it may also push us into partnerships that we are not always comfortable with.” Policy incoherence Sullivan arrived in Brussels 16 years ago to work as an assistant to a member of the European Parliament, but grew frustrated by the lack of focus on how Europe’s trade and tax policies, for instance, affected those beyond its borders. After a masters in government and development in Antwerp and two years with a teachers’ trade union, she joined ActionAid as media and advocacy manager 10 years ago, spending the last two years as regional director for Europe and the Americas. She remains on the board of European NGO confederation Concord. “When I came in, I would admit to the criticisms that we would rant a lot without giving alternatives. That has changed. The ability of NGOs to come and say, ‘we don’t agree with this, we’re proposing this instead’ has massively changed.” One lever is an appeal for policy coherence — the idea that transport or energy policy, for instance, ought not to undermine the bloc’s development goals. That means casting a wide net in lobbying efforts. “DEVCO [the EU’s development arm] holds the responsibility for the work on policy coherence for development,” she said. “They have to look at the impact of non-development policies on their efforts to stop poverty. What they always say is, ‘don’t come to us, you need to go to Trade, to Climate, because they are the ones not looking at these issues.’ And we say ‘yes, but we also need you to go and represent this issue vis-à-vis your colleagues.’” And now? Sullivan doesn’t know exactly, but she told Devex: “I want to work with organizations that understand that to transform the world outside, you have to transform your organization and yourself as an individual.”