7 - Outcomes of Social Change Making

Summary

In 2016, the British green transport activist John Stewart won the Sheila McKechnie Foundation Long-Term Achievement Award for excellence in environmental campaigning. Prior to this, in 2011, he came top of the list of the UK’s most effective environmentalists as judged by The Independent newspaper. When we interviewed Stewart in 2001 and again in 2004 he already had an impressive track record of what we might call ‘success’ within a range of environmental SCOs.

Stewart began his environmental SCM career working with a local transport group in Lambeth, London, which sought to make public transport fares fairer. This group became institutionalised and obtained council funding to deliver services to make public transport policy greener. This led to Stewart’s involvement in campaigns against road building in the 1980s. By the late 1980s this work had expanded to coordinating a London-wide network called All London Against the Road Menace (ALARM), which had around 250 local groups. To stop NIMBYism (that is, not-in-my-backyard tendencies), all grassroots groups signing up to this network were asked to pledge to agree to the principle of ‘no more new roads in London’, which prevented groups from pitting themselves against each other, thus preventing conflict and competition among groups pursuing the same goals. In 1990, UK transport minister Cecil Parkinson dropped all of the road schemes planned for London. Stewart told us that – if the anti-roads campaigns of the late 1980s had not been successful – Clapham Common (a significant green space in London) would now be a spaghetti junction of roads full of traffic. After this success, the network turned to help other national anti-road groups struggling to fight what had been dubbed the UK government’s largest road building scheme since the Romans (Saunders, 2013). It morphed into ALARM-UK, with around 300 groups across the country. The network engaged in non-violent direct action and again deemed itself successful. Stewart told us:

‘ALARM-UK felt like they had done their job. In 1989, the whole of the British Transport policy was “for” roads. By 1997, 10 years later, road building was still there … but on a much smaller scale, and public transport schemes were being proposed … which would have been inconceivable 10–15 years ago.’

(Stewart in interview, May 2001)