Advocacy vs. Neutrality

I’m having some trouble deciding what my role is here. I’ve always been on the policy advocacy side of things. Now I’m supposed to be a facilitator, a stakeholder engager, a bridge, a person who is supposedly more neutral. Now some of you would probably roll your eyes by now, since I’m rarely neutral on any issue, especially something as important to me as food/agriculture.

But that’s what I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be helping bridge the gap between the farmers and the governmental bureaucrats. I’m not supposed to be advocating for legitimization of urban agriculture. I’m supposed to advocating for what the farmers want.

You see the difference? I used always be advocating what I think is correct or what I want. But now I’m supposed to be the middle person.

So in many ways, I am helping to make the compromises. And if it’s one thing I don’t like when doing political advocacy is compromising. It’s not that I don’t think it’s necessary, it’s just that it’s so unnatural to be actually advocating for a compromise!

What I mean is this – we’re trying to get secure land tenure for urban farmers. Yet, many government planners won’t budge because of a combination of really having no land in urban areas and the outdated (but very entrenched) notion that agriculture only belongs in rural areas. So it’s pretty much impossible for all of the farmers groups that we work with to get their specific areas to be designated as urban agriculture land. If we really do advocate for all the areas, it would probably take forever and we won’t get anything done. But it’s a fine line between that and just giving in without a fight. After all, we are the only ones representing the farmers’ voices.

The problem comes in when my supervisor and I have different ideas about how much we should compromise, at least without a fight.

I, of course, being the “radical” wants to at least try to advocate for the really urban areas to be incorporated, not just the peri-urban areas. Isn’t that our duty as an NGO that is trying to help marginalized populations?

My supervisor, being the ever pragmatic town planner, wants to just make this as non-controversial as possible so that the process can move faster (and of course so we can report that we’ve made progress to our funders).

So, what to do, what to do?