This module demonstrates how to identify policy gaps and design advocacy strategies for climate adaptation that work to fill the gaps. It details an eight-step process for planning and implementing an advocacy strategy. It covers how to identify key target audiences and highlights different tactics advocates can use to influence these audiences.
By the end of the module, you will:
The below infographic provides a summary of the key content in this module:
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Advocacy is the “deliberate process of influencing those who make decisions about developing, changing and implementing policies.” Influencing those who hold power involves both direct and indirect advocacy, which can be coordinated for effectiveness.
Direct advocacy relates to lobbying, litigation and activism, while indirect advocacy relates to educating those you aim to influence and organizing action. Most advocacy falls into one or more of the five approaches shown in Figure 1.
Advocacy can be external, such as when a civil society organization tries to influence the government or private companies. It can also be internal. Internal advocacy occurs within an organization or institution. It aims to build organizational and political support for changes in policies, services, funding, or priorities that will benefit staff, the organization, consumers, or the wider community. For example, local governments could advocate to national authorities for more climate adaptation funding.
For any advocacy to be successful you need a clear strategy. This is a plan that will take you from first identifying what issue, or issues, you want to do advocacy on, through defining your goals and understanding who you need to influence to achieve them, to evaluating how successful your advocacy has been.
There is a tendency in advocacy to jump straight in, organizing demonstrations, writing to the media and generating a social media storm around climate issues. But unless you do your homework and devise a sound strategy, you can end up wasting a lot of time and effort. Ultimately, the success of your advocacy rests on the strength of your strategy.
Let’s look at what to do at each stage of the strategy process.
Doing a policy analysis is a crucial first step. It will help you identify the gaps in adaptation policy and define
what needs to change (the issue you will aim to influence). It will also inform your understanding of the enabling environment – the political, social and economic conditions you are operating in.
The Joint Principles for Action (JPA) are a benchmark for good adaptation planning and implementation.
According to the JPA, climate change adaptation policies are more equitable and effective when they follow seven principles (figure 2):
You can use the JPA to analyze existing policies and plans to see where they fall short and then define focus areas for advocacy. There is a JPA assessment tool you can use to produce a scorecard for how policies measure up to the principles.
Once you’ve identified gaps in policy, it’s time to home in on your advocacy issues and plan your strategy. CARE’s eight-step guide (Figure 3) guides you through how to plan (steps 1-6), implement (step 7) and evaluate (step 8) your advocacy strategy. We’ll go through each step below. (For full details on every step, see The CARE International Advocacy Handbook).
Here, you should ask: What is the adaptation problem we need to solve? Knowing what your problem is will help uncover some of its root causes and potential solutions.
When selecting advocacy issues ensure they meet the following criteria:
Problem tree analysis identifies the root causes and consequences of an issue. It is often done as a participatory exercise. A problem tree helps you identify solutions to a problem and express these as goals for change.
Identify the advocacy issue or problem. This is represented by the tree’s trunk. In the example in Figure 4, the impacts of climate change for people living in climate hotspots is the problem/issue.
Identify the root causes of the problem. Write these on the root of the tree. Some root causes can then be unpacked to show what contributes to the root causes. In Figure 5, the root cause ‘crops and livestock are not resilient to climate change’ can be broken down to include contributing factors, such as ‘climate-smart agriculture practices (e.g., tolerant seeds) are not being used’ and ‘no risk insurance on crops/ livestock.’
The final step is to identify the consequences of the problem/issue and write them as the branches of the tree. Again, these consequences can be unpacked to show what results from them. In Figure 5, the consequence ‘low crop yield’ leads to issues like ‘loss of jobs’ and ‘economic losses.’
This step involves identifying what is relevant and achievable within the circumstances in your country.
This can be done with a PESTLE analysis. PESTLE stands for: Political, Economic, Social Technological, Legal and Environmental factors or trends. This tool helps you identify new issues and opportunities, create scenarios, and develop a coherent vision for your advocacy objectives.
Questions to ask in a PESTLE analysis
TIP: For more detail about the questions to ask for each category, see The CARE international Advocacy Handbook.
How to do the PESTLE analysis
It is helpful to represent your PESTLE analysis in two columns, itemizing the positive and negative factors your strategy needs to contend with. Table 1 can serve as a template. It includes examples of positive and negative factors.
Define your advocacy goals and objectives
Here, the question is: What must change? This high-level thinking will help you define your goals. Once you have identified your goals, you can then flesh out the specific objectives that support them.
TIP: Download this advocacy strategy template and use it to define your goals, objectives and tactics.
After doing your policy analysis, you might have identified that your national government does not have a National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) in place. Knowing that a NAPA is vital to guide adaptation policy, you may then decide that you want to advocate for the government to develop a NAPA.
Your goal could be:
Your objectives could be:
When defining your goals and objectives, it pays to be specific. Aim for goals and objectives that are SMART. This means they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time- bound.
In the real world, it may not be possible to meet all the SMART criteria. Your goals and objectives might have just some of the main elements. So, it may be more realistic to see SMART goals as something to work towards rather than a hard-and-fast rule.
Your analysis with the problem tree, and understanding of the broader policy context from your PESTLE analysis, will help you define your SMART goals and objectives.
One you have clarified your goals and objectives you can test them against what is known as a Theory of Change. This is a testable hypothesis used to guide decision making and action during the development and execution of an advocacy strategy. It explains the process of change and helps you evaluate whether your advocacy actions are leading to the expected outcomes.
A Theory of Change is typically expressed in the format: “If X … then Y … because …”
IF youth organizations are empowered to engage in analysis and decision-making to inform climate change adaptation
THEN government will adopt better climate resilience and adaptation practices
BECAUSE youth organizations will hold government accountable and input on adaptation policy processes.
The question you need to ask is: Who has the power to make the change I want to see?
As with your goals, here it pays to be specific. Identify the specific individuals in positions of power you need to engage with. For example, you wouldn’t target the Ministry of Environment as a whole, since it’s too big. Rather, you would identify people in the Ministry, such as the Minister, her policy director, or a director within her department. Identify these people by name.
When deciding who to engage, specify your primary and secondary targets.
Also, consider how you can best reach these people.
Policy asks are the specific, real-world actions that you want your targets to take to achieve your advocacy goal(s).
Key messages are the main points you make about your advocacy issues. They include key information and arguments to persuade your targets to act.
Whether your advocacy audiences are policymakers, political elites, the business community, international agencies or members of the public, you must be clear what message you want to get across about climate change adaptation.
To be effective, your policy asks and key messages need to:
Before developing a budget and action plan for advocacy work, it is essential to make a realistic assessment of existing resources and identify potential sources of funding to support the work. It is helpful at this stage to identify possible donors and/or funding opportunities to finance your advocacy project. Here, you could draw up a list of potential donors to approach for funding.
Once you’ve planned out what you will do and know who you will engage to advocate for change, it’s time to go out and do your advocacy, using the tactics you think will be most effective.
You might feel like you want to just jump in and start creating things like videos, writing press releases and starting petitions. But doing this without a clear strategy is not a good use of your time and energy. Make sure that each tactic clearly supports your goal(s) and your strategy for reaching the people you aim to influence. Choose the appropriate tactics based on their cost, level of risk and chances of success in the existing political environment.
While it’s important to decide on an initial set of tactics to help you achieve your goal(s), you will need to remain flexible. It’s important to seize opportunities that may emerge (around political processes, or media opportunities, for example), even if it means changing your original plan.
Common tactics include:
IMPORTANT: Know your rights and keep yourself safe! In many countries the right to free assembly is limited in certain circumstances. Make sure you have read up on your rights before engaging in more high-risk forms of advocacy such as protesting.
According to research by The Management Centre Learning, there are five main reactions to change. Use these “five Cs” to reflect on how people will react to your call for change. You need to be prepared and plan an approach for each of them.
Perhaps 5–10% of the total. These are people who are prepared to stick their necks out, run with an idea, and own what happens. You need to treat champions cautiously since they generally champion everything. Their enthusiasm could give you a false impression of how everyone else is feeling.
Roughly 15–20% of the total. Chasers don’t immediately respond positively to your proposal for change. At the end of a briefing, they look around to see who’s signed up. They want to discuss your idea with others before forming a judgment and will generally look to a key opinion maker or “trigger” person for guidance.
About 30–50% of the total. Converts are the biggest single group in your change audience. They listen in silence to the proposed change and don’t ask questions. Converts want solid evidence in favour of the change in order to come on board.
15–20% of the total. They ask difficult questions initially and then … continue to do so. Their approach is to confront and be awkward because they have a strong stake in the outcome. Take this as an opportunity to be rigorous in your thinking and address issues that others may have, even before they come up.
Roughly 5–10% of the total. They will never be convinced. They can slow down or even derail change. They cause dissent and are essentially immovable.
When you engage in advocacy for change consider how you might deal with the 5Cs.
So, you’ve gone out and done your advocacy. Using appropriate tactics, you engaged with your primary and secondary targets with the aim of influencing them to make change. But how can you know if you have really achieved your goals? Or if your strategy is actually working?
That’s where the crucial step of evaluation comes in. Evaluating your strategy allows you to document your wins, highlight where you could have taken a different approach, and gives you a chance to redesign and plan new advocacy strategies.
Effective monitoring and evaluation require careful planning. It is vital to establish what information is necessary for tracking progress, and how it can be obtained, before the strategy is implemented.
Make sure you assign time for periodic reviews to adjust your strategy and tactics and update your monitoring and evaluation systems accordingly. No matter how much preparation goes into your strategy, advocacy initiatives rarely follow a set plan and anticipated timelines. It is important to acknowledge this by incorporating moments for reflection and learning. Develop a learning plan or timeline for sessions that review the data your team has collected and reflect on lessons learned and changes that need to be made.
When you defined your goals and objectives (in Step 3), you will have set timeframes for achieving these. Some of these might have a long-term horizon. But it’s good to frequently assess which of your goals and objectives you have met, using appropriate milestones.
Questions to ask include:
When evaluating your advocacy strategy, it’s important to assess what impacts it has had on the people you targeted and look to see if there are new targets to engage.
Questions to ask include:
Based on your understanding of how effective you have been at reaching your goals, and what you know about your target audiences, you can then review your tactics along with your Theory of Change.
Questions to ask include:
EXPLORE Youth Leadership in Climate Policy: Turning knowledge and skills into action for climate empowerment, a workbook and facilitator’s guide by Plan International. It includes problem tree worksheets and gives ideas on how to connect with stakeholders, including tips on messaging and useful tactics.
READ the Climate Justice Toolkit for Youth for ideas on advocacy methods (see page 15).
READ the UNDP’s Aiming Higher: Elevating Meaningful Youth Engagement for Climate Action, especially pages 19–26 which provide a framework for meaningful youth participation in climate action.
READ Gender and Climate Change Advocacy Strategy for inspiration on designing a strategy that advocates for gender responsive climate change adaptation policies. This 25-page strategy has been developed by the Gender and Climate Change Working Group in Kenya.
EXPLORE this online course from CARE, The Basics of Advocacy Strategy Design. Dig a little deeper into the first three steps in the advocacy planning and implementation cycle.
READ The CARE International Advocacy Handbook, (also available in French). This manual provides guidance on how to plan and implement advocacy strategies and actions and presents different advocacy tools that can be used. The Handbook features a wide variety of CARE’s advocacy initiatives along with several climate change advocacy initiatives.
READ the Southern Voices Climate Change Advocacy Toolkits, a handy resource for the different steps to develop and implement an advocacy strategy.
READ Plan International’s Youth Toolkit to learn how to design a campaign. It provides tips on how to design and analyze campaigns using PESTLE, problem tree analysis and a systems mapping tool.
READ UNICEF’s Prepare to Act booklet, which has many useful tips on how to engage with influencing policies and tactics to use in advocacy.
READ Oxfam’s Quick Guide to Power Analysis. This brief article discusses how unequal power relations manifest themselves and why having a more complete understanding of the power relations at play helps you identify appropriate strategies and entry points for programs.
READ the journal article Using evidence to influence policy: Oxfam’s experience, which combines insights from policy studies with specific case studies of Oxfam campaigns. It describes different ways to promote the uptake of research evidence in policy.
READ Youth participation in events by Contextual Safeguarding, which highlights the things you should keep in mind when inviting other young people to a public event.
READ this planning guide on how to hold a youth summit, a step-by-step outline for what to do when planning a public youth summit.
EXPLORE the Joint Principles for Adaptation (JPA) assessment tool and use it to analyze adaptation policies.
LEARN about the Integrated Risk Management (IRM) Law and Policy Checklist, developed by the Partners for Resilience (PfR) Programme. It will help you identify areas for improvement within current legislation, policies and implementation.
WATCH this video (6:25) to learn more about the Integrated Risk Management (IRM) Policy checklist. Your analysis can be used as a basis for climate change adaptation advocacy strategies.
LEARN about how to define a Theory of Change with these slides from CARE.
READ Power Tool: Developing a low-cost, low-tech Advocacy MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning) System (English, French) by CARE. This consists of multiple tools for developing a simple system to measure and track progress on your advocacy goals.
READ Monitoring and Evaluation for Advocacy and Influencing. This guide provides options to choose from, depending on who you are trying to influence, how you aim to influence, how you want to capture the effects of your advocacy effort, and what resources you have to achieve this.
EXPLORE the Advocacy Tracker and Advocacy and Influencing Impact Reporting Tool (AIIR Tool) (English, Arabic). Advocacy Tracker focuses on documenting small or intermediate achievements throughout the advocacy process. The AIIR Tool is an easy template for documenting and communicating an advocacy win. It can be incorporated into existing MEL systems.
Raising awareness in Turkana County and empowering Kenya’s young people to take part in climate advocacy: Ekai Nabenyo
Ekai Nabenyo is from Lorengelup, a small community in Turkana County, Northern Kenya, a dry and arid region. In this pastoralist community, people’s livelihoods depend on livestock. Ekai took an interest in climate change when studying climate law at university. He noticed that the indigenous community members, despite being severely impacted by the effects of climate change, were not part of the discussions around climate impacts and responses.
In 2012, he started the Lorengelup Community Development Initiative. The organization focused on raising awareness about climate change and other development issues in the community.
Ekai faced many challenges. For one, there was no existing platform for young people to participate in climate policy processes and Ekai struggled to gain access to decision-making processes. However, he persevered and his work on climate change awareness gained international attention. He was sponsored to attend COP21 to share his story with the rest of the world.
Ekai has since expanded his work and changed the name of the organization to Article 43, which operates across Kenya and has reached more than 20,000 community members. (Read the full case study in the Youth Climate Advocacy Special Report from the South African Institute of International Affairs).
READ The African Youth and Climate Change Policy Brief developed by The Youth Café (TYC), a non-profit, pan-African “youth-led and youth-serving” organization headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The brief highlights the challenges African young people face in participating in climate change matters and provides recommendations on how global and national leaders can address these challenges.
READ A Regional Perspective: Youth Voices on Climate Action & Recovery. This brief, developed by Green Africa Youth Organization, elevates the voices and ideas of youth across the Global South based on evidence-based, participatory workshops.
READ this Policy brief by Zimbabwean youth in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) enhancement process. It highlights how the revised NDCs can address young people’s concerns about climate change.
WATCH this video featuring Nkosilathi Nyathi (1:42), a young changemaker from Zimbabwe. He uses his public speaking skills to speak about how he is experiencing climate change. He attended COP25 where he had conversations with a range of people and presented at the High-Level Political Forum, where the Declaration on Children, Youth and Climate Action was signed.
WATCH this video featuring Davidzo Chizhengeni (4:40), who works as a small-scale farmer and is the founder of KVD Consultancy based in Zimbabwe. Davidzo invests his knowledge on farming to improve the livestock industry in his country and advocates for better farming practices.
WATCH this feature about African Youth from Kenya and Uganda who are using art to engage in advocacy on climate change (3:24). They use songs, visual art and games, which all involve creativity, storytelling and visual tools to communicate about the causes and effects of climate change and to propose solutions to these problems.
WATCH the video by Future Learn (3:30) for useful tips on academic writing.
LEARN about creative learning skills through the Start Writing Fiction course offered by the Open University. This course is free.
LEARN to write an op-ed with guidance from the OpEd Project.
LEARN how to develop a policy brief with guidance from the IDRC.
READ tips from Microsoft on how to write better emails.
LEARN how visual storytelling proved to be a successful method for women to influence National Adaptation Processes in Kenya.
Whether your favorite social app is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok, there are countless, creative ways to communicate your climate adaptation advocacy and actions and contribute to policy changes!
Time is TikTok Ticking!
Are you active on TikTok or just a casual viewer? Then you are part of over a billion TikTok users globally. TikTok has seen significant audience growth all over the world and its popularity continues to rise in Africa. For instance, the app’s market share in Nigeria is now over 31%.
TikTok Tips!
1. Catchy is King but Quality is Queen Snappy videos often perform better on TikTok. While the recommended length is 21–34 seconds, you do not have to limit yourself to this. After all, climate adaptation advocacy messages should be clear, persuasive and evidence- based! Make your videos concise without compromising quality.
2. Cross-posting is Key!
Share your TikTok video on other platforms to reach more audiences and attract more engagement.
Tip: Cross-post it on Instagram as a Reel!
3. No Harm in Hashtags
Like-minded young people can find your content more easily and join the conversation if you use relevant hashtags. Choose hashtags intentionally and keep to five hashtags at most. Be on the lookout for trending hashtags and use them if relevant!
Sample hashtags: #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #SDG13 #ClimateJustice or #ForClimate. What other hashtags would you add?
4. Calendar your Content
Post your content on relevant International Days like Earth Day (April 22), World Environment Day (June 5), Zero Emissions Day (September 21), International Day of Climate Action (October 24) and others. Do you have local climate and environment- related days in your country? Post on those days too and use local hashtags!
Get inspired: #ForClimate goes viral on TikTok!
In their 2019 year-end review, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies shared that almost half a billion people watched #ForClimate videos on TikTok that year!
Are you inspired to use TikTok to spread your messages and gain support for climate adaptation?
You have learnt a lot and have many red hot ideas. Test your knowledge with a quiz and give yourself space to cool down and reflect on what you have learnt. Use this section to take stock of how you will put your skills into action.
EXPLANATION: According to the JPA, national frameworks for climate change adaptation are more equitable and more effective when they follow these seven principles:
EXPLANATION: A “problem tree” is a useful tool for Step 1. Problem tree analysis identifies current root causes and consequences around an issue. It is often done as a participatory exercise between stakeholders and leads to a shared feeling of understanding, purpose and action. Using a problem tree can help you identify the solutions to your problem, and to express them as goals for policy or structural change.
EXPLANATION: A goal defines what policies need to be created, changed or enacted and what impact will they have on climate change adaptation. An objective defines what needs to change to achieve this goal.
EXPLANATION: Primary targets are decision-makers: people who have the power to make the change, such as politicians, government officials, community leaders and individuals in the private sector. Secondary targets are power-holders: people who have influence over the primary target, such as a Minister’s advisors, constituents, celebrities, academics, local government and the media.
EXPLANATION: Building coalitions/lobbying involves various tactics. These include participating in debates, dialogues, roundtables and panel discussions on climate change; face-to-face meetings with “secondary” targets who can influence your “primary” targets; informal influencing during receptions, among personal contacts and others; taking part in working groups, UN cluster groups, parliamentary committee; and policy briefings and letters.
Reflect and prepare for your climate adaptation action
To identify a potential advocacy issue, consider:
Then, think about how you could build an advocacy strategy based on what you have learned in this module. To get started, consider the following questions:
Once you’ve answered these questions and are ready to move forward, you can then further define and flesh out your strategy using the information in this module.
