How leading climate movement advocates perceive collective gridlock in social change advocacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite mass mobilization efforts, most countries are failing to meet their internationally agreed 2030 goals to mitigate climate change, representing a failure of the climate movement to achieve their key aspirations. Most research on failure and collective action examines one‐off failures but does not address lasting failure. We conceptualize this ongoing failure as collective gridlock: times in social change advocacy where insufficient progress is caused by antagonistic intergroup stalemates, preventing groups from achieving shared goals and addressing joint problems. We used semi‐structured interviews with climate movement leaders ( N = 28) to explore collective gridlock and the processes that may be associated with it. Most advocates believed they were in gridlock as they perceived insufficient progress toward their movement's goals. Evidence for the proposed processes of attrition, group norms of purity and intransigence, moral conviction, hostility toward the outgroup, radicalization, and perceived counter‐mobilization emerged in the interviews. Contrary to expectations, climate movement leaders also reported a need to build coalitions and compromise, and they also discussed negative well‐being as an outcome of collective gridlock. The current study contributes to our understanding of persistent failure in the climate movement and its implications for social change advocacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".