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Lobbying For Social Change: A Challenge

par Arifon, Olivier
Référence World of Media. Journal of Russian Media and Journalism Studies, 1, page (119-146)
Publication Publié, 2016

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

One of the questions rose by lobbying campaigns made by citizen driven organizations and civil society (above NGO’s) is the possibility to evaluate efficiency. Research on NGO’s (Scholte, 2009, Reitig, 2011, Betsill and Corell, 2001) underline the lack of efficient strategies able to lobby the policy makers. In this paper, we examine lobbying’s methods and proce-dures of communication used to for lobbying and we propose indicators to evaluate actions able to define efficiency of NGO’s campaigns.Our methodology is based on literature review, moreover on cooperation with citizen driven organizations. This cooperation gives us access to events, campaigns meeting, communication material, etc. Interviews with policy officers and officials of the European institutions in Brussels complete the methodology. With three campaigns of citizen driven organizations, the aim is to identify success and failure in their strategies. Our research reveals three different results:- Lobbying, at least at EU or UN level, should rely on the complete set of communication tools and channels able to reach different types of public, in order to raise or maintain aware-ness, and finally convict decision makers to vote a law (national level) or a resolution (Un level).- While discovering social media, NGO would have better results if they follow the trend is-sued by private companies to promote their products: consideration and dialog, both with pol-icy maker and their public.- The proliferation of tools and channels available for delivering a message can conduct to deliver several “incoherent messages”, i.e. messages more or less adapted to the specificity of each channel and to each public. In return, this creates an imprecise communication not in favor of the NGO.