by Laure de Dainville, Guest of FAWCO delegation at CSW70
When people come together for advocacy, there’s real energy in the room. There’s also, sometimes, a quiet question: what will this actually change? If the answer doesn’t look like immediate policy change, it can be deflating. But that disappointment might say more about the standard we’re using than the event itself, and we may be missing reasons to be genuinely hopeful.
Take demonstrations. A common refrain is that they fail because governments rarely change policy in direct response. But that might conflate the proximate goal with the actual one. Demonstrations rarely move policy on their own. What they seem to do is sustain the people who do. They build community, restore hope, and recharge the individuals who carry the fight forward on the other 364 days of the year. By that measure, most demonstrations might actually succeed.
Conferences feel similar. The instinct, especially at a UN conference where global policy is theoretically made, is to ask: What commitment was secured? What resolution passed? Will we see actual change? These are reasonable questions, but they may not be complete ones. If a conference sharpened someone’s argument, reconnected an isolated advocate, reminded a burned-out organizer why the work matters, or opened a relationship that will carry the work further than any single resolution could, something real happened. Something that will show up later, downstream, in ways that are harder to measure but no less important.
Different events serve different needs. Recognizing that might help us get more out of all of them.
Editor’s note: Laure de Dainville is a Program Lead, International for AGO. She attended CSW70 as a delegate guest of FAWCO.