How professionalisation can blind NGOs
This article was originally released as an edition of my newsletter.
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For the last year, I’ve been running a campaign to ban private jets with Stay Grounded - an international network campaigning against aviation for a just mobility system.
I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. I mean we didn’t ban private jets in a year, obviously. But private jet use has been widely scandalised, from Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl to an Italian influencer family who was pushed to give up their private jet because, to quote, “they’re breaking my balls”. Politicians in particular have felt the heat, with Rishi Sunak tying himself in knots trying to defend his private jet use.
This, combined with widespread civil disobedience against private jets in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the UK and Italy, has translated into political progress. By my count, there has been political proposals to restrict, tax or ban private jets in France, Spain, Scotland, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the UK, the US, and at the EU level. In the Netherlands, Eindhoven and Amsterdam Schiphol Airports even took it upon themselves to ban private jets from their airports.
In other words, private jets are facing a backlash after their pandemic-era economic boom.
But there’s a problem - the far-right are also targeting private jets
Let’s take the Davos World Economic Forum as a case study.
In 2023, Debt for Climate Switzerland prevented attendees from arriving by blockading a private jet airport. The action received widespread international media attention, with organisations like Stay Grounded helping to push a progressive narrative about social and climate justice.
This year, we didn’t do press or action work around Davos and the difference was stark. Not only did the press report almost nothing about private jet use, but when I searched “private jets davos” on Twitter during the conference, the posts were overwhelmingly by far-right and climate denying accounts
Late last year in the Netherlands, a photo circulated widely among right-wing Twitter accounts apparently showing green-left politician and former EU Climate Chief Frans Timmermans on a private jet. The fact the photo is AI-generated didn’t prevent enough of a storm that the party itself felt the need to respond.
And this is not just about social media. In the US, conservative media outlets have used the perceived private jet hypocrisy of climate envoy John Kerry to portray climate policy as elitist, while British equivalents have done the same with Harry and Megan.
Meanwhile, NGOs are turning their attention away from private jets.
Already, private jets were a low priority in the NGO world for a simple reason: they represent a small fraction of aviation’s emissions. This is a classic NGO logical fallacy, which undervalues the wider political value of private jets to scandalise aviation and win ordinary people over to climate action.
Instead, professionalised nonprofits are focusing on so-called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). I won’t get into why SAF is a pipe dream. What’s important for you to know is that there is widespread agreement within the sector that for us to avoid climate disaster, we will need fewer airplanes in the sky. Here’s a recent report from Transport & Environment Europe, one of the more techno-optimist NGOs, making clear that technology alone cannot save us.
So why focus on SAF?
Reason one is money. There is limited funding available to anti-aviation NGOs from foundations and philanthropists, and over the last few years this funding has increasingly come with SAF strings attached. Big funders don’t want us to campaign on private jets or reducing flights - they want us to campaign for sustainable aviation fuel.
This is like going to a Oil Change International and saying “we’ll fund you, but only if you campaign for fossil gas!” Sure, it’s slightly better than alternative fuels. But you’re actively campaigning for the industry you should be against.
In defence of my colleagues in the sector, there is some logic to this, since we are in a critical moment for shaping policy on so-called SAF, with governments drafting legislation on the topic for the first time.
The problem is that big funders are pushing NGOs into the blackhole of policy minutia and scientific details, at the expense of wider political strategy.
We’re allowing narratives that we could easily control, such as the injustice of private jets, to be captured by a fascist political movement that is less concerned with policy minutia than with portraying climate policy as an elitist war on ordinary people.
As usual, the grassroots provide hope.
It is social movements, unconstrained by the desires of big funders, who are avoiding the temptation to jump on the SAF hype train, with Scientist Rebellion, Code Rouge, and Last Generation all doing excellent work in the last year to scandalise private jets with a progressive narrative.
Grassroots movements recognise what NGOs too often forget: symbolic, popular issues that highlight the injustice of our system have massive potential to mobilise ordinary people who feel let down by the system, and might otherwise be convinced by far-right narratives.
This is why I’m proud of our campaign against private jets. And this is why I was so moved by the recent farewell speech of Caroline Lucas (the outgoing English Green Member of Parliament) to environmental NGOs in the UK.
[Over the last few years, NGOs have] focused on small incremental wins, rather than the overall direction of travel, valued a seat around the table over speaking truth to power, overlooked radical analysis… instead playing it safe.
This is a damning analysis from one of the most UK’s most sympathetic politicians towards NGOs. Someone who is sitting at the table of British parliamentary power, and sees that environmental NGOs are being too incrementalist.
Elsewhere, in Spain, a group of employees and former employees of the Ecologists in Action (a grassroots federation) launched a scathing 76-page report about how the organisation had abandoned its radical roots in the process of professionalisation, instead becoming clients to the the “green capitalist” demands of funders.
At Stay Grounded, we’re going through a “radicality process”, which is a strategic reflection on whether our theory of change is radical enough for the time of polycrisis we are living through. I’m not sure what the answer will be, but this is a process that many NGOs could do with going through themselves.
If you’re interested in knowing more about this process, and how it feeds our political strategy, let me know. I’d love to exchange.
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STUFF WORTH KNOWING
✊🏿 No climate justice without racial justice. Union of Justice, the European organisation founded by Magid Magid to work on racial justice and climate justice, have released a stonking 128-page report on climate change and racism in Europe. It’s beautifully presented. It’s exhuastive. It’s important. (Spot the picture of our recent disruption of the European Parliament contained 😉)
🇪🇺 Smaller, diverse, united. While most analyses of the Greens have focused on their losses in France and Germany, Filipe Henrique points out that their growth elsewhere means that they will be more diverse.
🚔 More protest repression in the UK. Continuing a trend from across Europe that is particularly acute in the UK, police arrested 27 Just Stop Oil activists on suspicion of planning civil disobedience at airports. Not only are the victims in such cases arrested, but they’re subject to highly invasive searches through their belongings, and have phones and laptops seized.
💦 Activists shoot tourists! Anti-mass tourism protestors in Barcelona have been squirting tourists with water guns. While this obviously annoys people, research on ‘the radical flank effect’ suggests that radical tactics from one wing of the movement, even if the make that wing of the movement unpopular, can still help the cause.
🇪🇺 Greens hold balance of power - not the far-right. Ursula von der Leyen has turned to the Greens to secure her position as European Commissioner. The Greens are obviously hesitant to support a figure like VDL and said they won’t vote for her without guarantees on the Green Deal. But the alternative is handing power to the far-right.