There are four powers you need to shift a system, say Leadbeater and Whinall. And all of them have shaped the rise and rise of veganism
A great paper from the long-standing social innovator Charlie Leadbeater, with Jennie Winhall from the ROCKWOOL foundation, dwelling on “the powers needed to shift a system”. They’re laid out the powers below - and followed by a case study on Veganism, which shows how these powers makes sense of its increasing social authority (the other case study is the Aids campaign “Silence = Death”.
The Powerful and the Powerless
Will you start your strategy for change by working with already powerful insiders, to redirect their existing power to bring about change? Or will you attempt to mobilise outsiders and outliers?
“Power over” and “Power With”
“Power over” is associated with hierarchies and institutions. “Power with” is associated with social movements. Which combinations of power will your strategy for change engage?
Resistance and Initiative
The negative power to resist change is very different from the positive power to initiate change, yet often system innovation succeeds when they are connected, when opposition to a current system generates propositions to change it.
Hard and Soft
Power comes in hard and soft forms, in rules and norms, resources and values, the explicit and the tacit. How can your strategy for change mobilise all forms of power?
These four different dimensions of power are at play in success stories of system change.
Veganism as a case study of the four Perspectives on power
Donald Watson probably never saw himself as a revolutionary. He was a woodwork teacher in a British secondary school. But in 1944, as an exhausted Britain moved into the final stages of the Second World War, Watson came up with an idea that may yet change the world in fundamental ways, and according to some, could even save it. Rejecting names such as “dairy barn”, “vitan”, and “benevore”, Watson created a new entirely plant-based diet and lifestyle, which we now know as “vegan” (The Vegan Society, n.d.).
As a young boy growing up in Yorkshire, Watson had worked on his uncle’s farm and was horrified by the slaughter of the friendly pigs he had got to know. He became a vegetarian on New Year’s day in 1924 at the age of 14, convinced that modern life was built on an exploitation of animals that was comparable in its immorality to human slavery. Sixteen years later, he decided the logical extension of his commitment to animal rights was to do without dairy products as well as meat.
He lived an ascetic life, carefully crafted from simple ingredients: wood working, organic farming, cycling, walking, and amateur photography. There was no smoking, drinking or other toxins. Critics scoffed that he would never survive on his meagre diet. He died in 2005 at the age of 95.
In November 1944, Watson and his wife, Dorothy, together with four friends, took the first step to turn their lifestyle into what would eventually become a movement: they founded the Vegan Society in the British midland town of Leicester. Vegan stood for the beginning and end of ‘vegetarian’ because veganism carried vegetarianism through to its logical conclusion.
How things have changed. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, veganism has enjoyed the kind of exponential growth normally confined to tech start-ups. Among young people, veganism is an increasingly mainstream choice. In both Denmark and France, canteens and restaurants have been instructed to increase the availability of vegetarian food.
The kind of transition that veganism is going through - from an obscure and outlandish cult to a new way to live that is followed by millions of people around the world - is changing social norms and markets as well as industries and public policy.
How did veganism become such a powerful force reshaping the world food industry?
Veganism started deep in the margins. Even six decades after it was created, it was a cult of punks and hippies who were widely regarded as esoteric and even extreme. Their commitment kept the movement going in the social undergrowth even when it had little traction in wider society. Movements often start with visionary prophets in the wilderness, like Donald Watson and his friends, people who are prepared to be dismissed as irrelevant oddballs who turn out to be well ahead of their time. For decades, veganism languished on the fringes among people who were not looking for a larger following: the whole point of the movement was to remain counter-cultural, the province of outsiders and outcasts.
Veganism generated its power by reaching out beyond the faithful to the unconverted and outright sceptical. By doing so, it created a new and more powerful coalition.
New forms of communication and community building played a critical role. Watson and his friends started spreading the word using newsletters printed on a mimeograph machine. Veganism took off with online documentaries, like Cowspiracy and Earthlings, which showed in graphic and distressing detail exactly what it takes for animals to become the meat on our plates. Those documentaries were a delivery system for facts that quickened the pulse and infused people with outrage and passion. Made available by online streaming services, word spread fast through peer recommendation. Watching them became a rite of passage for young people.
These documentaries provided a “moving frame” for the issues that veganism is concerned with: modern farming is exploiting animals and killing them cruelly while contributing to climate change and environmental destruction. The documentaries and the commentary that surrounded them were a “moving frame”: they explained what was going on and why it was wrong; made people feel deeply emotional and outraged at the injustice involved and showed who was responsible, the industrialised food industry. They told people what they could do to make a difference: to right the wrong, become a vegan.
To create “power with”, people need places where they can gather. The Vegan Society created by Watson and his friends did that on a small scale. The Internet and social media have provided multiple new gathering places in forums and blogs and Instagram and Twitter accounts, where vegans learn from one another how to adopt the lifestyle.
One powerful congregation is the international community that follows Deliciously Ella, the Internet sensation Ella Woodward who is one of the leading advocates of clean eating. Deliciously Ella takes many of the ingredients of Watson’s diet and way of life and makes them attractive and aspirational to 21st century consumers. She embodies the lifestyle as a personal guru to her many thousands of online followers.
That paved the way for the movement to go from the negative power of opposition to the positive power of initiative. Veganism started as an anti-movement, against animal exploitation. Giving up meat was a virtuous sacrifice. It has become an aspirational movement for a better way to live. As the coalition supporting veganism expanded, it became part of a wider set of “flexitarian” approaches to food in which many people are sometimes vegans, mainly vegetarian and occasionally fish and meat eaters. That flexible approach would be an anathema to many deeply committed vegans but it has expanded dramatically the potential constituency.
Donald Watson’s asceticism has been reborn as ethical, minimalist simplicity. As Keegan Kuhn, one of the producers of Cowspiracy put it: “Whereas before, veganism may have been viewed like you were giving up something, now it’s been reframed as what you gain, now it’s been reframed as what you gain: you gain health, you gain a greater sense of living in bounds with your values, you gain all the environmental benefits”.
As it moved from opposition to proposition, veganism also moved from the outside to the inside of the food system. For years governments had been urging people to eat more healthily, with a diet based on four portions of fruit and vegetables a day. That meant that veganism was not such a big step from the conventional wisdom about healthy eating. Meanwhile, the mainstream food industry started to sense a new market was opening up among younger consumers. From about 2010, they started to make space on their shelves for almond milk, soya sausages and beetroot burgers. The regime dominating the food industry was changing: insiders were increasingly working in tandem with outsiders.
Veganism has made the crossing from the margins to the mainstream by going from an oppositional movement for those angry at environmental degradation and animal cruelty, to becoming a lifestyle movement for healthy, environmentally-conscious consumers. It moved out of the places where the faithful congregate, into supermarkets, kitchens and restaurants, into the mainstream food system. The dominant regime started to change from without and within at the same time.
It remains to be seen what new food systems will emerge. “Clean meat” offers the prospect of eating meat without that having to involve killing animals. Richard Branson is one of the investors in a synthetic meat business, Memphis Meats, which will use synthetic biology to grow meat from animal cells. No animal will be killed to make this meat. This will be just one part of a vegan-inspired meat and dairy substitutes industry, which is projected to be worth $40 billion by 2020. Large food companies like Kraft, Nestle, Unilever and Walmart are investing in developing more plant-based lines.
Analysts at the Oxford Martin Institute’s Future of Food Programme estimate that if the world went on a vegan inspired diet, the savings in terms of health care and environmental costs would be close to $2 trillion a year. Yet for many this kind of hyper-industrialised food system will be a corruption of the original ideals of veganism, a compromise with the very corporate interests so many of its early adherents were against.
Reviewing this story, what different kinds of power were involved? Veganism deployed soft power to shift in values but that then reshaped the hard systems of production; “power with” generated by a social movement forced change in “power over” in hierarchies and institutions; the outsider power of the movement combined with the insider power of those within the mainstream industry who saw an opportunity to innovate; power to resist turned into the power to initiate.