This chapter is about theory of activism. You probably won't find much practical advice here, but you will learn the basic terminology about activism and other related concepts.
🧠 This is a background chapter: At Activist Handbook, we focus on writing a practical guides for activists. Sometimes, theory is useful in explaining the emergence of the practices we write about in further chapters.
- Want to take action now? Skip this chapter. We encourage you to explore our various other chapters, which can be found in the left sidebar.
- Want to improve your understanding of activism? This is the right place to start.
¶ What is a ‘theory of change’?
This section has not been written yet.
¶ The Activist Handbook theory
¶ About activism
To understand better what we mean with activism and why we are interested in it, we recommend you to read the following articles:
¶ About demonstrations
¶ Theoretical concepts
As activist, there are probably lots of things that you would like to change. These theoretic concepts will help you understand better how different phenomena are connected.
We discuss terms that are frequently used in the context of change-making, and investigate their meaning:
- Dignity of life
- Democracy
- Ecology
- Justice
- Power
- Intersectionality
- Environmental activism and religions
- Overton window
- Performative activism
¶ Improve this page
¶ Focus
When improving this page, focus on the following:
- Find a way to structure this chapter
- Discuss ‘theory of change' in general, and our perspective on it. We already have an article on theory of change, which should be integrated with this chapter.
¶ Questions activist may have
- What is activism?
- What do theoretical concepts such as participatory democracy, peer to peer education etc mean?
- How do activists understand justice and equality?
- What are ethics?
¶ Search keywords
People look up the following topics on Google:
| Keywords | Monthly global searches* | Relevancy |
|---|---|---|
| theory of change | 6.6K | high |
| change theories | 20.5K | low |
| overton window | 47.8K | low |
| activism definition | 8.3K | medium |
| examples of activism | 1K | high |
| why is activism important | 950 | high |
| performative activism | 9.7K | medium |
| effective protests in history | 140 | high |
| successful activism examples | 10 | high |
| are protests effective in promoting social change | 20 | high |
| what motivates people to struggle for change | 620 | high |
| what does it take to be an activist | 90 | high |
*According to Semrush
¶ External resources
¶ Creative commons
The following resources about theory of change are available under a creative commons licence, which means we can freely reuse them:
- Theory of change by Beautiful Trouble
- Theories of Change by James Whelan
- Elements of a Theory of Change by Naomi Blackburn
- Our Model for Community Change and Improvement by Community Tool Box
- Other Models for Promoting Community Health and Development by Community Tool Box
- Theories of change by The Change Agency
- Exercise: Writing a theory of change together by Action Evaluation Collaborative
- Visual: Building a campaign strategy by The Change Agency
- Where's The Power? Developing Your Theory of Change by Marshall Ganz and the New Organizing Institute
¶ Copyright work
There resources are not available under a creative commons licence, but they're still a good read:
- Theory of change for advocacy and campaigns by Jenny Ross
- Academic: Effective Social Justice Advocacy, A Theory-of-Change Framework for Assessing Progress by Barbara Klugman
¶ Examples
Examples of theories of change: