Radical climate protests linked to increases in public support for moderate organisations

Why this matters

Whether disruptive radical protest helps or harms the broader climate movement is one of the most contested questions in movement strategy. Most existing evidence comes from lab experiments using fictional scenarios. This study provides the first real-world test, tracking a nationally representative sample across the actual M25 blockade - one of the most high-profile and controversial protest actions in recent UK climate history.

What we found

Surveys conducted before and after Just Stop Oil’s week-long blockade of the M25 in November 2022 found that increased awareness of the radical group was associated with a 3.3% increase in support for Friends of the Earth, a moderate climate organisation that played no part in the protests. This is the positive radical flank effect: radical actions making moderate groups look more reasonable and trustworthy by comparison, and channelling heightened public attention towards the broader movement. The protests did not produce a measurable change in attitudes towards Just Stop Oil itself, nor towards climate policy more broadly - but they did not reduce support for either. The findings suggest that non-violent radical actions may be a largely untapped strategic resource for moderate groups within the climate movement.

What it means for the movement

The results challenge the common assumption that disruptive radical protest is simply counterproductive for the broader movement. If radical actions increase support for moderate organisations, this has direct implications for how different parts of the climate movement relate to each other - and for how funders and strategists think about the overall ecosystem. Moderate organisations may have more reason to welcome (or at least not publicly oppose) radical action than they currently acknowledge, and the movement as a whole may benefit from a diversity of tactics operating in parallel.

Read the full paper

The findings above are a summary. The full peer-reviewed paper is published in Nature Sustainability and available at doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01444-1.

Read the full paper