understanding collective action theories through massive mobilizations in the public space

I´m founder of a civic movement in Bogotá that promotes collective action and cooperation through particular lived experiences in the public space. We plan and execute massive mobilizations where people collaborate with each other and achieve goals together. The experience of engaging directly with communities brings up aspects on collective action at micro level, which are hardly discoverable from a theoretical perspective.

​"Why would I stop littering, if everyone in the city will keep doing it?" "Is my individual contribution actually relevant for larger social problems?" "By cleaning the city one day, no one is ensuring that will be clean in the long term". All sort of pessimistic questions inspired this initiative, specifically around the issue of waste management in Bogotá, Colombia. I and a group of very driven volunteers decided to promote a notion of change that transcends an individual helping with one action, but encouraging the same individual to actively sustain the positive change by demonstrating impact, correcting others and generating a sense of responsibility on them.

The rationale of the mobilizations took inspiration from collective action theories, that have identified the characteristics of scenarios where people will most likely cooperate. Some of these characteristics include the design of incentives for people to pursue a change, crafting messages that connect to people, controlling the events to prevent opportunism, eliminating suspicion, providing correct and timely information, ensuring the security of the events for all participants and generating credibility.

We did need clever incentives, since we called people to wake up quite early on a Sunday to go and clean the smelly streets of Bogotá.

For a more detail presentation of the conceptual framework of this project (in Spanish) click here.

Here are our biggest learnings, when trying to link theory with practice:

1. New experiences, when done collectively get normalized and understood quickly: The idea of cleaning the public space becomes normal until many people start doing it. I consider this as the beginning of collective thinking. When people in the street witnessed the mobilization, there was certainly an individual evaluation of the risks and benefits of joining the cleanup. By seeing others assuming the risk, the probability for people to enroll increased.
2. The vision of the city, even if it is strongly enforced, it can be improved: Pessimism is very prevalent in Bogotá. We realized that providing people with motives to do something -and complain less- does work to modify learned conceptions of the space where we coexist.
3. Collective action, or collective thought? Completely transparent and effective collective actions will require a longer period of time to be examined and produced. Nevertheless, experiences like this project do provide people with an understanding of what it means to think collectively.
4. What happens after the mobilization matters: Beyond justifying the collective action and actually make it happen, the motivation post-event was crucial for achieving larger civic goals. By organizing this event we ourselves fell into the commitment of sustaining the communication and strengthening a chain of people and messages that continuously remembered people of the relevance of collective benefits. We did receive some amazing calls from citizens declaring they stopped throwing the cigarette butt on the street, and others that laughed about their braveness when telling other people to keep the waste in their pockets instead of littering.

Micro intentions reveal the true nature of altruistic behaviours
​In an environment where collective action is happening, there are spontaneous actions from people that illustrate the nature of altruistic behaviours. These actions are intrinsic to each person and genuine in intention. Interestingly, in theory they don´t count as triggers for collaboration. In practice, they were enormously powerful for generating the best results. In our experience, some of them included people correcting others, sharing knowledge, demonstrating abilities, smiling and coexisting in a space. These are the actions that inspire and trigger the whole sociological conception of this project, instead of a macro perspective of people following others as a justification for collective behaviour.
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These micro intentions guided the design of the following versions of the project. We strategically emphasized and encouraged any interactions amongst people that would make them work together.

The first edition of the massive garbage pickups took place in Bogotá in 23 collection points, convocating 1,500 citizens. The movement expanded to other cities and towns in Colombia: Cali, Bucaramanga, Yopal, Madrid, Funza and Mosquera. In October 2014, we organized an international conference, boosting the knowledge and frameworks of the mobilizations to larger debates.