Introduction
Social movements are big, and often messy endeavors, and what’s often missing is a bigger picture view and strategy for how they evolve and progress to achieve lasting change. US-activist and educator, Bill Moyer, created the Movement Action Plan as a tool to help organizers understand the larger evolution of successful social movements, drawing from historical and personal experience. It is designed to be a practical guide for activists who seek to analyse, plan and enhance their campaigns.
Bill Moyer wrote the Movement Action Plan in 1987, but it’s still very relevant today. We can see similar patterns that he describes below in the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Nuclear Movement, Palestinian Liberation Movement, the growing Anti-Data Center Movement, and more.
The Need for a Strategic Framework
MAP is an analytic tool for movements working on national and international issues. It describes eight stages that movements commonly pass through over years or decades. MAP is a theoretical model, not a fixed sequence. Movements rarely occupy only one stage or proceed neatly from one stage to the next. Each major demand of a movement may be at a different point. A movement can win one demand, then redirect attention to others in earlier stages. The civil rights movement, for example, moved through the stages first around lunch-counter sit-ins, then buses and public accommodations, and later voting rights.
The Movement Action Plan, or MAP, grew from the anti-nuclear energy movement. In spring 1977, 1,414 Clamshell Alliance activists occupied the Seabrook nuclear power site and spent 12 days in jail. The action made nuclear energy a major public issue, inspired support demonstrations, and helped launch hundreds of grassroots anti-nuclear groups.
Yet at a February 1978 strategy conference, Clamshell organizers felt defeated. Seabrook was still under construction, the government still supported a massive nuclear expansion, activists were burning out, and some were considering more militant tactics. Moyer created MAP to show that the movement had not failed. It had moved rapidly through the take-off stage and was approaching majority opposition. As Moyer said:
Every major social movement of the past twenty years has undergone a significant collapse, in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile. This has happened even when movements were actually progressing reasonably well along the normal path taken by past successful movements!
Activists have long had models for nonviolent action and community organizing, but lacked a practical framework for understanding the full life of a social movement. Without one, they may fail to recognize progress, set realistic goals, develop suitable strategies, connect local work to national change, or avoid common pitfalls. MAP was developed to give activists perspective, hope, and practical guidance while reducing discouragement, burnout, and dropout.
