- Effective advocacy strategies for influencing government policy: a conceptual model
- Politics and Advocacy
- The Role of Public Opinion in Advocacy Success
- Lobbyists for Good: What is Advocacy?
Your target also has dispositions (policies, incentives and disincentives, cultural ableism, political pressures, economic concerns, etc.) that you can use to anticipate where advocacy might be needed, and where an advocacy ecosystem framework might be more useful than simply responding to an oppressive action.
You can think of these dispositions and system drives like thirst or hunger in us. You can also think of these dispositions as implicit biases which provide “answers” to “questions” that the system gets from its environment, including your advocacy “questions”. They are all flows of ongoing perceiving and acting to deal with the unavoidable in the target environment.
As advocates, we also have dispositions, both as drives and biases, and we too act continuously in the same way that our targets do. You can use your target’s dispositions to enhance your advocacy, and you can use your own dispositions through reflection and dialogue to expand your vision of the possibilities of advocacy, as well as expanding your skills. Most importantly, you can use reflection on your experience and practice of advocacy to move along the 3 phases of becoming a capable advocate:
- Beginning: Creating a base reference system of rules and techniques in your brain to recognize repeatable patterns and methods of advocacy.
- Adeptness: Understanding when to break the reference system’s rules and tweak the techniques in order to solve difficult or unusual advocacy challenges.
- Mastering: Being able to respond to the entirely unique aspects that a particular situation requires for a successful advocacy outcome.
Your brain can “jump” to new levels of capability through the experience and training you gain over time. And you can collaborate with other advocates to expand the scope and impact of your advocacy. The process of reaching mastery of advocacy is a process of building pattern-recognition and reflection competence as an integrated internal complex adaptive system.
Your target’s dispositions are roughly similar across time, and once you have had significant interaction with the target, you can begin to see these dispositions as the structure of the system, and you can anticipate them as roughly standard responses to your advocacy.
We can think of target dispositions as constraints within which the target operates. They are like the weak link processes that the target has with agencies and local context processes. While advocates might have difficulty destabilizing a disposition (as advocates, we often don’t have the ability to do this), we can always threaten the relationship that the target has built up with some specific dispositional trend or force-say a millage election.
