You’re not prepared until you have practiced how you will respond.

Trust can take years to build but minutes to destroy. Some crises hit suddenly, while others, like funding cuts or anti-immigration narratives, creep in slowly.

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In natural ecosystems, dolphins detect changes in water salinity and birds sense air pressure to know when a storm is coming. We need a similar system to monitor the early signs that a crisis or opportunity is coming, and we also need to rehearse what we will do when the storm comes.

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We recommend:

• Using the storm chart section on What to monitor to look for warning signs 

• Creating a thermometer to rank the severity of crises and opportunities, and identify when to monitor / prepare / respond / pivot.

Likewise, the foundations of a strong campaign or organization lie not just in planning but building a supportive culture. This strengthens our resilience as well as our ability to use the four strategies for storms and our ability to pivot quickly. Some organizations advocate for resilience organizing as opposed to campaign organizing - prioritizing resilience, culture and movement strength are equally as much as the external change you seek.*

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We recommend you look at your campaign or organization as a system, look for warning signs of storms, and build resilience as follows: 

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Generations of community knowledge and practice have helped people survive and adapt to natural disasters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Inga community in Colombia used their strong community networks to organize harvest distribution based on families' locations, helping them cope with movement restrictions.**

Campaigners should always be prepared for crises or opportunities. Good crisis management is 90% preparation. By practicing key scenarios, campaigners can build resilience and adaptability.

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Organizations often plan for crises by writing down a full risk register but rarely do so for opportunities. Some evaluators suggest a "pre-mortem"—imagining the campaign failed a week after launch and asking what went wrong.

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We propose going one step further. After understanding the system (Section 1), creating a storm chart (Chapter 15) and understanding good internal and external stakeholder responses (Section 3) - run a “role play” exercise in real time for every key threat and opportunity. Discuss which of the four strategies from Chapter 18 you may need.

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We recommend the following principles inspired by resilience practices in your rehearsal:

• Practice collectivism: Share resources and learn from others affected.

• Stay connected: Set up alternative communication methods if usual ones fail. Hybrid networks that combine instant messaging together with physical leafleting can reach further.

• Protect critical connections: Support older people, women, and others to keep communities together.

• Find goodness and tap into tradition: Make time for positive activities like games or music.

• Take the long view: Do things today that will help in the long term.

Read more:

More steps you can take: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/authoritarianism-trump-resistance-defeat 

Steps you can take include: building and funding a support network of allies - see Solidarity Uganda’s rapid response system here: https://mobilisationlab.org/resources/creating-a-rapid-response-system/ 

How disinformation works effectively and how newsrooms can copy that: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/whats-disinformation-doing-right-and-what-can-newsrooms-learn-from-it/ 

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Sources:

*Read more on resilience-based organizing from the US-based Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project here: https://commonslibrary.org/propagate-pollinate-practice-curriculum-tools-for-a-just-transition/ 

**https://www.ifad.org/ar/web/latest/-/story/indigenous-knowledge-and-resilience-in-a-covid-19-wor-1 

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The mass production of palm oil in Indonesia has raised major concerns across local communities and the human rights and environmental movements due to large-scale land conversion and loss of forests. Environmentalists have also become concerned by traceability and social aspects like labor rights in palm oil supply chains. 

Every year during political moments and the forest fire season (the peak is usually July to September), palm oil becomes a high profile media issue. The palm oil industry has been very successful in using Public Relations (PR) to create a developmental storm (see the Storm Chart earlier in this Chapter and Section) at this time to influence Indonesian public debate to support their work. 

Indonesian civil society articulated a need to build collectivism and resilience to better influence and then shape the public debate about palm oil. 

Civil Society communicators identified the organized and consistent PR strategies used by the palm oil industry:

• Warning signs: 

  • Where: Business and economics media and social media featured many palm oil articles and stories.

  • Who: Government officials and academics were key spokespersons.

  • Who: The main narrative was usually shaped by those in power and tied to economic development, positioning palm oil as a commodity that reduces poverty and provides jobs for people and smallholder farmers. 

  • Why: The deep narrative was nationalism in the face of foreign interference

    • Highlighting how the palm oil industry has been the pride of Indonesia, 

    • Framing a “false choice” that NGOs or foreign countries) who “criticize” the industry are foreigners trying to harm the palm oil business / trying to ‘dictate’ what Indonesia should do. 

Civil society developed campaigns together in advance of the peak forest fire season that could prevent some of the palm oil industry’s rhetoric dominating media:

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• Resilience strategies to help organizations simulate scenarios to charge, sidestep and adapt:

  • How and What: Showcase stories of local communities to add more perspective of what happens in practice, to counter the current narrative that highlights the economic aspect and benefits for smallholder farmers. 

  • Who: Partner up with academics to have credible and curated data in hand, to debunk and question the claim made by the companies

  • Why: Develop counter-narrative that also use the economic and nationalism angles, and engage with the business community to find a way for them to tell stories linked to this counter narrative.

Knowing the momentum and tactics of the palm oil industry have been key to preparation that will make their storms easier to handle.  This helps Indonesian civil society to build resilience and monitor for when the storm hits.