[Part 7 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]

Once you figured out where you are going to play, you need to figure out how you are going to play — your strategy for winning.

I asked a few of my organizer buddies the top tips more progressives should know about organizing strategy. They gave me a lot of great ideas. But when I started writing them up, I realized that the biggest problem folks like McKibben face boils down to one simple point — do what’s effective, not what’s easy or comfortable.

Take the post that got me to write this series. McKibben criticized Gore’s strategy:

Simply adding a few thousand more tons of scientific reports to the environmental side of the scale won’t tip the debate, not when Exxon can afford to buy the necessary coterie of Congress members.

McKibben is arguing that as a play on the board, publishing more scientific reports isn’t the right move to push Congress. But McKibben’s answer wasn’t much better.

The United States now holds a big key to unlock this process, and we need Obama and the U.S. Congress to turn that key–which is why many of the candlelight vigils will take place at U.S. senate offices, and at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world.

Does he really think Enviro candlelight vigils are going to move the Senate?

The problem isn’t the tactic, it’s the play. If tea baggers and Glenn Beck held candlelight vigils at Republican Senate offices, that would have some teeth. Why? Republican senators know that these folks — and even more importantly the folks who are part of their network — have the power to fire up the Republican base against them and cost them votes, or even field a challenger who has a real chance of winning. Ditto if union members held candlelight vigils against Senate Democrats in states where the senators know unions have the power to influence Democratic primaries. But Enviros? Give me a break.

That’s why organizers start by mapping out who are the players they need to move, and what realistically will it take to move them. It’s often called a Power Analysis:

Imagine a football game–the coach aids the team to determine the opposing team’s power as defined by its strengths and weaknesses. What kind of power and which players will it take to move the ball across the field to the goal line and victory? The coach is conducting a power analysis that will inform his design of a winning strategy. The power analysis is a process to determine what kind of power (quality) and how much power (quantity) is needed to move a target, the individual who can give you what you want, to accept the organization’s policy or proposal for resolving an issue. The process includes a systematic series of questions, investigative steps, information collection and refined knowledge of the players with power to deliver you closer to your goal. All with the purpose of moving the people with power to give you what you want or win your proposal.

Doing a power analysis is a lot of hard work. For example, here’s a standard list of questions you’d need to answer for each target to develop a target’s profile (courtesy of the Praxis Project and SCOPE LA): Continue reading →

[Part 4 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]

Maybe banging heads with corporations around the globe is more than you’re up for. No problem. There’s still a much better board to play on than DC or Copenhagen — the state/local board. I don’t know a lot about global municipal politics, so for this post I’m going to focus on U.S. state and local governments.

Because national newspapers and most large progressive groups are obsessed with DC, it’s easy to forget how much power local government has. The Progressive State Network estimates that states have control over $2 trillion a year — “almost three times the dollar amount of non-social security domestic programs administered at the federal level.” Through laws and liability rules, states regulate “trillions of dollars of commerce.” And through public pension funds, states have control of over $2.7 trillion of financial assets.

Local government can have a pretty impressive impact on global warming. Depending on the estimates, between two thirds and 70% of greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. And although most state and local governments are in financial trouble right now, there are plenty of things we could do to push for reducing global warming that don’t require states to spend lots of money. As ICLEI notes, for example, they set a lot of the rules of the game that affect emissions in the economy:

Local government planning and decision making is particularly important in the energy, transport, industry, water and land use sectors — where emissions grew the most from 1970 to 2004.

And unlike DC, you don’t need a super-super majority to get things done. That’s why there is a hell of a lot more interesting green work going on at the states than in DC; more on that in the next post.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t play at all in DC. But I think our emphasis ought to be in pushing money and opportunities down to the states, such as The Urban Land Institute’s “3 B’s” strategy for Federal transportation dollars I blogged in November. Ditto for federal Green jobs stimulus — instead of focusing everything on changing a handful of senators, focus on moving the money to where we have more room to maneuver.

Even if you think we should focus on DC, first we have to win in the states — in particular, the states that keep shutting the rest of the country down. As progressives are learning the hard way, being strong in California and New York doesn’t mean squat if we are weak in Louisiana, Nebraska, and Connecticut. If we’re going to win in DC in the long run, in key states like these we’ve got to build year-round campaign coalitions that know how to kick ass together. As the Right has demonstrated, state and local fights are great way to build that base.

There’s already lots of Enviro activist work going on at the local level, and some of it, such as the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities campaign, is coordinated. Similarly, in the Progressive States Network’s very sharp 2010 Shared Multistate Agenda, one of the six key areas state legislators across the country have agreed to fight for in a coordinated way is promoting Green Buildings.

So if there is already lots going on, what exactly am I proposing? Let me put it this way: do you know what your city or state’s plan is to reduce its emissions? Unless you’re an Enviro policy geek or live in New York City, probably not. Most of us are not paying attention to local or state fights. Suppose we did — all at once.

In short, what I’m talking about is a strategic play — moving money, energy, and other resources from the DC board to the state/local board.

Up Next: the moves already being made on the local board that demonstrate we can win big if we go local.

I need a brief break — this time for wrestling with my Inner Theory Allegators, not because of my hands. I’ll return to the Underpants Gnomes series next week.