Advancing Reform: Embedded Activism to Develop Climate Solutions

Abstract

Activists increasingly seek to influence organizations that also espouse support for social movement goals, encouraging the use of collaborative tactics. While there has been growing research on insider activists who import social movement resources, little is known about how internal activism might operate through a coordinated and collaborative approach with external social movement organizations, which we refer to as embedded activism. Likewise, collaborative activists encounter organizations with a wide range of prior reform experience, and the resulting “opportunity structure” for collaboration is not well understood. We investigate how a network of embedded activists can operate to advance reform efforts across diverse organizations. Our analysis combines surveys, interviews, and archival records from the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program, which embeds graduate students in partner organizations to advance climate change reforms. Embedded activists accomplish this work by matching external resources with the organizational context in order to generate a fertile mixture of support and ambiguity and create new solutions. External resources are especially important for organizations that are at the extremes of prior issue development.