An Overview of Advocacy Practices

1. An Overview of Advocacy Practices National Seminar on Globalisation and India: Voices from the Ground 18-19 December 2006 at Lucknow organised by CUTS International, Jaipur in partnership with NEED, Lucknow Jayati Srivastava Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament School of International Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Email: jayatis@mail.jnu.ac.in

2. Advocacy • Advocacy: a planned and organised set of actions to effectively influence public policies to empower the marginalised. • In a liberal democracy, uses democratic, non-violent and constitutional means • Perceived as a value driven political process • Questions and changes existing unequal power relations in favour of the socially, politically and economically marginalised • Can occur at multiple levels of the policy process: local, national, and/or international • At some or all phases of public policy making: • agenda setting • formulation of policies • enactment of policies • At implementation; monitoring and enforcement stage

3. The Study • Addressing the pertinent issues of accountability and transparency. • Main objective: evaluate advocacy practices to ascertain what advocacy tools is most efficient at the ground level on issues of globalisation and trade. • Within a right-based framework emanating from the development literature which is considered more effective, and sustainable. • Promises higher levels of empowerment, ownership, and free, meaningful and active participation.

4. Methodology and Field Area • Case study methodology • Four states: Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal; four different independent researchers. • Context specificity of advocacy practices considered important given diverse socio-economic and political context of the 4 states • Overall framework: Comparative research design for comparable success and failure stories of advocacy practices and tools. • Qualitative field interviews in select villages and districts with different stakeholders

5. Partner Organisations • Karnataka: Consumer Research, Education & Awareness Trust (CREAT), Bangalore • Rajasthan: CUTS Centre for Consumer Action, Research & Training (CUTS-CART), Jaipur • Uttar Pradesh: Network for Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (NEED), Lucknow • West Bengal: CUTS Calcutta Resource Centre (CUTS-CRC), Calcutta

6. Advocacy Tools • Outreach Meetings • Workshops targeting State Level Officials • State and national advocacy workshops also for: • State level for State Trade Policy Councils (STPCs) • National level for National Trade Policy Council (NTPC) • Media Workshops • National Seminars and Workshops • E- Group and E- list • Publications: Making Things Happen, Gram Gadar, GRANITE Newsletter, Briefing papers, etc.

7. Evaluating Advocacy Practices -1 • Practice means: an experience, a specific intervention strategy, activity or process of an organisation or a group of organisations to achieve social change. • Could include policy advocacy, poverty eradication, agricultural technique, an educational method or international coalition building. • Based on these criterions, good, bad and innovative practices were identified: • Good practice: reasonable quantitative and qualitative evidence to show its effectiveness in achieving specific objective and has potential for replication. • Innovative practice: Inconclusive evidence of its effectiveness but it looks promising. • Bad practice: Failures or negligible success; learning from failures needed to achieve desired objectives.

8. Evaluating Advocacy Practices - 2 • Success of individual advocacy practice contingent on it meeting one, some or all of the following criteria: • Creating awareness amongst stakeholders about WTO, trade and globalisation. • Ascertaining their perceptions on livelihood concerns in the context of WTO and globalisation • Influencing trade policy making both at the state and union level. • Positive intervention people’s livelihood: in terms of generating alternative marketing avenues for farmers and textile workers. • Capacity building of partner organisations and other CSOs.

9. Evaluating Advocacy Practices: An Overview

10. Lessons Learnt • Different advocacy practices are effective on different stakeholders. • Outreach meetings: most effective tool for awareness generation and ascertaining peoples perceptions at the grassroots. • Capacity building and training workshop • reasonably effective for media representatives and partner CSO’s as also publications. • Government officials and policy makers • a multi pronged approach including personal pursuance, capacity-building and training workshop, specific publication; delegations, signature campaigns, etc. are useful advocacy tools • Overall success was limited • Different approach and medium of communication for diverse stakeholders. • use of local language. • Contextual specificity important. • Collective effort rather than individual effort is of utmost importance in making a meaningful intervention

11. Conclusions • Access of public to trade policy-making is actively denied: • Intransigence of government officials to respond to ground reality • Transparency and accountability in public policy process absent. • VeneKlasen and Miller: although a key advocacy goal is to create opportunities for citizen’s groups to be directly engaged in policy processes, engagement does not always impact policy decisions in the end. It is easy to believe that access to policymakers will translate into influence, but in practice this is rarely true (emphasis added). • Influence of CSOs in the policy- making domain is more if they claim the space rather than being invited • Claming and creating that space in the policy domain should be priority of advocacy in future