Opposition to Agenda 21 and What You Can Do

How does a nonbinding sustainability framework become, for some, a symbol of the loss of both individual rights and private property?

Agenda 21 is a nonbinding international agreement made at the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  In most countries it is simply a guideline to help countries make a more sustainable world.  But in the U.S., Agenda 21 is a term to be avoided, due to its more loaded interpretation by the Tea Party.  

In the U.S., it is common for Tea Partyists to disagree with environmentalists and planners, and for this disagreement to result in standstill.  In the interest of becoming a more empathic planner, and a more effective communicator, I have been curious about how to understand the Tea Party perspective.  Here I will explore the ideas behind the Tea Party interpretation of Agenda 21, the popularity of this opposition in the U.S., its impacts, the Tea Party mentality, and what environmental planners can do to engage the opposition constructively.

Opposition to Agenda 21

The dialogue of the opposition to Agenda 21 includes theories that extrapolate concerns about Agenda 21's intentions and implementation into dystopic futures.  Sound bites such as "pack'em and stack'em" enumerate the fear of suburbanites losing their way of life when they are forced to move into high rise buildings downtown (Lenz 2012).  Fear of this dystopia bleeds over into opposition to bicycle paths, public transit, and even into any initiative that has sustainable terms, including more social terms such as "equity" (Koire 2011).  

The opposition to Agenda 21 stems from a dislike of big government and defense of private property and individual rights (CBS 2010a, CBS 2010b).  It manifests as anti-global governance, such as the UN, and an association of green initiatives with socialism, fascism, or communism.  The debate plays out in a battle between the Tea Party and environmental governance institutions.  At the heart of this battle is the U.S. office of ICLEI, the UN's partner NGO for local Agenda 21 support (Clabough 2010, Koire 2011).  

Popularity of the Opposition in the U.S.

Agenda 21 oppositionists and Tea Party members are minorities in the U.S (APA 2012).  The majority of Americans oppose the Tea Party, 14% support them but are not active, and only 4% of Americans are active members of the Tea Party, having either donated or attended a Tea Party event (CBS 2010).  These active members constitute over 12 million people who have been highly instrumental despite their minority status in reframing the conversation around local environmental governance.

 

Impacts of Agenda 21 Opposition

As a result of the Tea Party's pressure, 47 bills have been introduced at the state level against Agenda 21 (Schonerd 2013).  Five of these have passed (Schonerd 2013), though in Missouri, the governor vetoed the bill (Jost 2013).  An account of the change in ICLEI memberships across the country reveals the influence of Tea Party activism as well.  Of the at least 715 local governments who have at one time been members of ICLEI, only 505 hold memberships today (this is a minimum based on analyzing memberships in 2010, 2012, and 2013 from icleiusa.org).  Withdrawn memberships have occurred across the country in forty states.

The Tea Party

The Tea Party first formed in 2008 after the downturn, but gelled after a large protest on September 12, 2009.  Today, several organizations constitute the Tea Party, and each has its own nuances.  

Three groups are instrumental in the anti-Agenda 21 rhetoric: FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Patriots, and the John Birch Society.  The Koch brothers founded FreedomWorks in 2004, and this organization now runs training events, conferences, research, and media production for many of the other Tea Party groups on top of maintaining a large membership (Clabough 2010).  FreedomWorks was originally credited with founding the Tea Party itself (CSE 2002).  The John Birch Society has been active since 1958 but is now resurging on the tails of the Tea Party (Hurghart and Zezkind 2011).  The Tea Party Patriots is one of the grass roots Tea Party organizations, formed by three ordinary citizens who were fed up with the way America was being run.  It now has a wide membership (IREHR 2010). 

These organizations find leadership on the opposition to Agenda 21 through members of the U.S. Government, including Senator Ted Cruz (TX R) and Representative Michele Bachmann (MN R) (Cruz 2013).  Glenn Beck provides much of the information for the movement through his radio talk show, his magazine The Blaze, and even a novel he co-authored.  Rosa Koire has a novel of her own, and encourages Tea Party members to distribute her flyers, be active in local government, encourage their local government to withdraw ICLEI membership, and to oppose any initiatives that contain certain Agenda 21 buzzwords (Koire 2011).

Foundations of the Tea Party

At heart, the Tea Party is about smaller government and individual rights regarding property ownership.  The core of the Tea Party does not center around a common ground regarding environmental issues.  When surveyed, Tea Partyists are much more aligned about questions of government size than on climate change, for example.

Understanding the Tea Party

One way to understand the Tea Party is through an interesting framework established by psychologist Jonathan Haidt that measures the moral reasoning of individuals.  In 2011, Haidt identified five moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity.

Using Haidt's five moral intuitions, Wojcik compared Tea Party members with members of other parties (Haidt and Graham 2007).  Wojcik found that Tea Party members utilized the five moral intuitions more evenly, much like conservatives and libertarians.

This makes it difficult for liberals to understand and communicate with Tea Partyists because they primarily use just two, care and fairness (2010; 2011a).  Wojcik also found that Tea Party supporters on average have a lower "Need for Cognition," defined as an innate attraction to tasks that are intellectually challenging (Mussell 2010).  A low need for cognition is correlated with a greater halo effect and high social anxiety (Petty et al. 2009, Osberg 1987).  On average, Tea Party supporters also have a higher need for social acceptance according to the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne and Marlowe 1960; Wojcik 2011b).  These differences reveal basic underlying ways of seeing the world, reasoning, and making value judgements that hinder communication across the political divide.

How to Engage the Tea Party

When determining how best to engage the Tea Party, environmental planners have two choices: they can focus more on short-term or on long-term effects. 

The short-term path involves marginalization, combating, and proselytizing Tea Party members.  However, this path can have high costs because negative reactions can feed the flames of subversive groups, increasing antagonistic membership and activism (Banerjee 2013).  The alternative is a more long-term approach that focuses on learning and understanding through participation.  This approach assumes that there is some collaborative benefit of working with those opposed to Agenda 21 rather than fighting, which is often the case for environmental conflict at the local level (Forester 2009).  At the grass roots level, the opposition to Agenda 21 does not come from a dislike of environmental issues per se, and therein lies the possibility for coordination between environmental advocates and the anti-Agenda 21 supporters.

In order to take advantage of the second approach, environmental planners must be able to recognize that there are disadvantages to Agenda 21 and that there are times when the Tea Party is right.   They must consider the perspective of Tea Party members in their interactions with the public.  This approach requires training in environmental conflict management, time and resources for the participatory process, and the courage to be open to a more bottom-up method that is not controlled from the top.  This approach has the potential benefits of reducing oppositional posturing, increasing the effectiveness of local government, and improving outcomes.

Building trust, and finding areas of common ground are two crucial factors when engaging any groups that have a history of disagreement.  If environmentalists are to engage Tea Partyists, they must do the same.  

Trust building is based on developing relationships, and this can only happen if there is dialogue between groups as well as some transparency.  Therefore, environmentalists need to get out there and talk with (no, make that listen to) more people that are on the other side of the political spectrum.

Potential areas of overlap include the principal of subsidiarity, which is the legalese term for using the smallest size governing body that is effective to get something done (i.e. if it can be done at the local level, it should be done there, and not at the national level).  Using smaller-scale governments is often recognized by both groups, in principle, though this can change depending if the larger scale is aligning with the views of the group on any particular issue.

This post is based on material from a presentation and paper from Dec 2013 by Jennifer Rae Pierce at the Intersection of Crisis and Transition conference held by the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Central European University, in Budapest, Hungary.

References

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