How mass protest created a breakthrough on the climate crisis in the Netherlands

This article How mass protest created a breakthrough on the climate crisis in the Netherlands was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Creating a trigger event and a moment of the whirlwind — a period in which social movements capture the political spotlight in a country in a major way and shift the terms of public debate — is a rare and important accomplishment. The initial rounds of Extinction Rebellion actions in the U.K. in 2018 and Sunrise’s public breakthrough in the United States the same year, as well as the emergence of Fridays for Future in 2019, each made significant waves.

However, since then there have been limited moments in which climate activism has resonated as profoundly and altered public opinion. Movements are now actively trying to experiment and innovate in order to create a new wave of whirlwinds — and their success in figuring this out will be critical for whether social movements can win in the future.

In the fall of 2023, activists with Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, or XR NL, were able to create an important whirlwind moment that may serve as a model for the next wave.

After a series of blockades that escalated over the course of two years, they reached a period in September and October 2023 during which daily protests became a media sensation and drew mass participation, with estimates of up to 25,000 people joining on the biggest day of protest. The campaign saw an extraordinary level of collective sacrifice, with as many as 2,500 people being arrested in a single day and a total of more than 6,000 arrests occurring over an eight-month period.

Discussion of the campaign’s demand of ending public subsidies for the fossil fuel industry became an important topic in mainstream Dutch politics. The campaign succeeded in generating widespread popular support for their issue, whereas many other activists using similar tactics have not been able to achieve such gains with the public.

So what, then, did the Dutch campaign do differently? And what can we learn from their efforts?

I conducted interviews with four top organizers of the campaign to explore these questions. From these conversations, three key lessons emerge.

The importance of a great symbolic demand

The first lesson is the importance of finding and elevating a symbolically loaded demand that can resonate widely with ordinary people.

For building mass protests, the technical aspects of how an activist demand might play out when negotiated in the political system are less important than the ability of the public to understand and relate with the cause, and therefore become motivated to join in pressuring public officials to respond decisively. Later on, inside-game players and organizations within other parts of the social movement ecology will be critical in sorting out the instrumental details of the specific proposals adopted to address the issue. But organizers in the mass protest sphere — whose job is to reshape the political terrain and thereby alter the limits of what is considered politically practical and necessary — do best to focus on their demand’s popular resonance.

In the case of XR NL, organizers were savvy in identifying public subsidies for fossil fuels as an issue that could galvanize the public.

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A report published in June 2020 by the environmental advocacy group Milieudefensie indicated that these subsidies cost the Dutch public an average of 4.9 billion euros (or $5.4 billion) per year. XR NL’s campaign was successful in moving this from being an obscure item that few people understood to being a central topic of public debate. As writer and former XR organizer Douglas Rogers previously reported for Waging Nonviolence, “This was a niche issue at the time” that the group launched its campaign in 2020. Three years later, it had decisively entered the mainstream.

“No politician would ever be able to raise the profile of something like this,” XR NL spokesperson Chris Julien told me. “These actions became a headline political theme, and politicians started to say, ‘Yeah, we want to end fossil subsidies.’” The importance of the topic, he argued, “really got absorbed by the political class.”

The issue was easily understood by most people. Lucas Winnips, one of the core organizers, told me that when they began, the estimated amount of fossil fuel subsidies “was already more than the climate budget at the time. So people were immediately outraged when they heard about it, and there was a lot of enthusiasm to join.” He added, “it was just totally clear that you should stop fossil fuel subsidies in the time of climate crisis.”

Julien said it helped tremendously that the demand was “very commonsensical” and that the core message was “super simple.” He added, “I think everybody felt a sense of empowerment and agency because the demand was just right.”

Unlike with other climate related demands such as banning private jets or opposing private financing of fossil fuel expansion, people could easily relate with the idea that taxpayer money was being wasted on something they did not believe in. XR NL organizer Emma Nantermoz told me that listeners responded positively when organizers highlighted how much fossil fuel subsidies cost the public. As she put it, the campaigners could show that “this money could be spent, for example, on free public transport… or a higher minimum salary. … You could spend that money much better, in a way that could benefit everyone.” It was a message that resonated with many people outside of usual leftist, activist and youth circles.

Julien believes that the spokespeople they used to represent the demand also reinforced its common-sense appeal. “The people we encouraged to go in front of the camera were all super reasonable — firm and clear on the science of what needs to be done, but otherwise very ‘mom and pop,’” he said. Having a combination of people who were “super everyday” in their overall presentation and profile but radical enough in their politics to join XR NL’s campaign of civil disobedience “really grew the movement,” he contended.

Over time, as activists focused increasing attention on the issue, it created opportunities for new research and inquiries into the issue to become public flashpoints. In particular, a series of successive studies released during the campaign showed that the initial estimate of the amount of subsidies being received by the fossil fuel industry had, in fact, been dramatically understated. With each new investigation, the true amount of public funds devoted to fossil fuel subsidies was revealed to be much higher than previously estimated, spurring greater public outrage and feeding activists’ momentum.

As Lucas Winnips told me, “[By early 2023] a former Euro Member of the European Parliament for the Social Democrats did his own research and found out that the amount was 17.5 billion euros. So it was already like four times as big as was said by the state.”

The amount soared even more by the time the campaign was reaching its climax. On Sept. 19, 2023, Reuters ran a headline reporting that a government report acknowledged that “Dutch firms get up to $49 billion annually in fossil fuel subsidies.” This figure was nearly 10 times the initial estimates.

For the media, the exposés that were being published amid the pressure generated by protest created fresh occasions when it was appropriate to ask politicians about the position on the topic. Chris Julien contended that there was “a level of journalistic interest, both in the demand and in the actions, that I think reinforced each other as the actions grew, and it became a properly national story.” As Tessel Hofstede, another key XR NL organizer I interviewed, explained, “The media did a big part of our mobilization work.”

By fall 2023, polling showed huge public backing for ending fossil fuel subsidies. A September 2023 poll among the subscribers of the Dutch news network RTL Nieuwspanel found that 70 percent of its readers support the campaign’s goals of ending the government’s fossil fuel subsidies. As the “subsidies issue” became a mainstream topic in Dutch public life, organizers say they witnessed a shifting in the Overton Window around what proposals were considered feasible and necessary for the government to pursue.

The need for a plan of escalation

A second key lesson from the XR NL campaign is that activists hoping to create breakthrough political ruptures using disruptive protest must have a plan of escalation, in which more and more people are enlisted to participate. Crucial to achieving this is having a “ladder of engagement.” The ladder lays out steps people can take to become more active over time — moving from passive bystanders, to curious supporters, to active backers of the movement, to participants willing to risk arrest and make other sacrifices to advance the cause.

The way in which the Dutch campaign created such a ladder emerged somewhat organically over time. That said, organizers were able to recognize critical elements that were leading to success and alter their actions to emphasize these elements.

Ultimately, as compared with protests in other countries that have used similar highway blockade tactics, the action scenario deployed in the Netherlands focused less on disruption (e.g. blocking significant amounts of traffic) than on maximizing participation and therefore increasing collective sacrifice by allowing people to be arrested in a relatively low-stakes sit-in at a symbolically loaded location.

This course of action evolved in several stages. While the XR NL campaign started in 2020, its first few years were relatively understated, in part due to COVID. Actions focusing on blockading a section of the A12 highway in the Hague began in earnest in July 2022. That month, and again in November of that year, activists succeeded in blocking the road for short periods — with 25 people being arrested in the first protest and 150 in the second.

At the start of 2023, activists benefited from what scholars of civil resistance call “the paradox of repression.” In advance of the next planned blockade, Dutch police arrested eight people for promoting the protest on social media, going so far as to carry out early-morning raids on the homes of a half dozen XR organizers on Jan. 26. This crackdown backfired. As Douglas Rogers wrote, “The arrests sparked public outrage at this clampdown on the right to protest, with nearly 40 civil society organizations  —  among them Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Oxfam  —  declaring not only their opposition to the arrests, but their intention to send representatives in support of the impending blockade.”

The campaign continued by carrying out major blockades in actions generally spaced between six and eight weeks apart. To organizers’ delight, participation almost doubled each time. As the authorities responded to protests on March 11 (which by then involved some 3,000 participants) and May 27 (which drew as many as 7,000), police began using water cannons to disperse crowds, which exposed people to hypothermia. This repression was once again widely viewed as excessive and ended up helping the activists’ cause, making the blockades a national story.

“The water cannons were quite nasty because it was very cold,” Tessel Hofstede said. Media coverage echoed this impression. “It added, again, to the outrage, and the feeling of injustice that people had,” Winnips argued. Nantermoz noted that it was also the first time the Dutch police had turned water cannons on peaceful protesters, “so the prime minister had to [address] that on national TV.” As Douglas Rogers reported, the “May 27 blockade was a tour de force, generating international news coverage, viral vibes and over 1,500 arrests (among them several Dutch celebrities, including ‘Game of Thrones’ actor Carice van Houten).”

In addition to the “paradox of repression,” the campaign benefited from having a good location for its actions. The area of the road activists blockaded “looks up onto the tower where the big lobby organization for multinationals is,” Chris Julien said. Then, after the road goes through a tunnel, “there is the parliament and the Ministry for Economic Affairs.” Because these were the two most important decision-making bodies on climate and subsidies issues, the location helped to reinforce the protests’ “action logic” — making it clear why the demonstrators were assembling. As Julien said of the location: “It’s very iconic, it makes sense to people immediately. … You don’t need more than a second to clarify why we’re there.”

The location also allowed for escalating participation over time, in ways that many other road blockade actions do not.

Blocking a highway tends to be a tactic that is highly disruptive and potentially dangerous, as activists are often dealing with heavy traffic and vehicles that may ordinarily move at high speeds. This makes it more difficult to have large numbers of people participate. But in the case of the A12, there were several factors that made it less dangerous and disruptive, and that allowed for greater participation. This ended up increasing the overall level of sacrifice — since many people could make the decision to risk arrest — and minimizing public backlash.

While the location allowed people to break the symbolic barrier of stepping onto the street and preventing passage, the action took place at the end of the A12, where cars were already coming to a stop. As Julien explained: “You have this really well-contained strip of road, the cars are slowing down to come up to traffic lights and starting to go onto the highway from the traffic lights. So [when] we blocked the traffic light side, [it was] super safe.”

The blockades did not happen on a regular schedule, such as the first Saturday of every month. The variable timing added a bit of unpredictability. “You never really knew what was going to happen,” Julien explained. “We had a little bit of the detective thriller thing going on for the media, [keeping them] guessing what’s going to happen.” That said, the organizers would ultimately announce the demonstrations in advance. This lessened the level of inconvenience for motorists being stuck, as police were able to reroute traffic relatively easily and the blockades created only minor delays for commuters.

Organizers believed that the announcement could also demonstrate their resolve; as Winnips argued, it showed “a sort of confidence that you just announced it, but you’re going to do it regardless of what the authorities say. We’re just doing it because it’s necessary.”

A final factor that affected the protest’s balance of sacrifice and disruption, increasing participation in the direct action, was a ruling by a judge determining that being arrested and removed was punishment enough for the protesters, and that further prosecution was unnecessary. At that point, Julien explained, all the police could do was “cart us off to another part of the city… and then drop us off.” Although the authorities were sometimes violent, the fact that the penalty for participating in the blockades was “the lowest level of arrest thinkable” helped people who might not otherwise get involved “step into that space,” he said.

Crucial for the ladder of engagement, the site where the road blockades took place was situated next to a public park with a large open field traditionally used for protests. This could serve as a gathering place for crowds of people who turned up to support the blockades, but who were not yet ready to risk arrest themselves. “People could kind of walk [on to the blockaded road], take a look and be part of it for a while, and then once the police would start escalating, they could step out,” Julien explained. “So there was a lot of flexibility in how you wanted to participate.”

Rogers wrote of the protest dynamics, “Anyone not willing or able to face arrest was encouraged to attend in active logistical and moral support.” This system “did a lot to sustain the campaign’s distinctive positive energy — but also provided an escalator for people to get progressively more inspired and involved.”

As the campaign gained steam and the size of the supportive crowds in the park next to the blockaded road grew in size, the gatherings became “almost festival-style events,” in Julien’s words. They included cultural activities, yoga sessions and even a volunteer orchestra, xr.musicians, with more than 100 members who would perform concerts. The positive atmosphere aided the ladder of engagement, creating many entry points for new participants.

According to organizers, a key factor in the campaign’s success was the party atmosphere that organically emerged around the large mobilizations. “Don’t be too serious,” Tessel Hofstede advised. “The climate crisis is serious business, of course, but… let it be a bit fun. There’ll be music and dancing and socializing and reunions of friends. … The world is so crappy already, there is so much sadness, so why not enjoy being there with like-minded people?” Winnips, too, praised the festival atmosphere, citing a quote often attributed to Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

The feelings of collective unity and purpose the demonstrators generated helped fuel the movement’s growth. Julien described it as “joyous” and “happily out of sync,” especially compared with previous actions. “It’s always a weird multi-experience,” he said. “There’s different things going on at the same time, and different emotions.” But it was clear that the inclusion of music and dancing contributed to the overall feeling of “uplift,” as did the thousands of supporters cheering on the principal demonstrators from the sidelines.

The water cannons used by police, which in the cold of the winter had been cruel instruments of repression, unexpectedly became “gifts” once summer arrived, according to XR NL organizer Hofstede. They gave rise to appealing “images of people in bikinis dancing in the water and having fun with blow-up crocodiles and stuff like that,” she said. This helped create the impression that the blockades were a kind of fun summer party that nobody wanted to miss. “We managed to turn it into something positive for us,” Hofstede notes. Julien likewise called the use of water cannons a “happy accident” which helped show that the demonstrations were “not only resilient, but also quite joyful and self-affirming in the way people came together.”

A last way in which activists escalated their campaign was by creating an intensive period in which they dramatically increased the frequency of their gatherings. After a series of periodic blockades that extended into the summer of 2023, organizers decided to “hit the red button,” as Julien puts it, by transitioning to carrying out daily actions. These daily road blockades commenced on Sept. 9 and continued for more than a month.

“I think it is important with A12 that we waited before doing a proper escalation,” Nantermoz argued. “We already had quite strong blockades by the beginning of 2023, and after each one we would meet together as a team and decide on what and when to do next. There were several times when we considered escalating [with more frequent protests] but we decided instead to keep the focus on growth, and only once we had a very strong structure… did we decide to actually escalate with the marathon blockade.”

Once daily protests commenced, the weekday actions were small, involving core groups of the most committed activists. However, the weekend events continued to be large, festival-like gatherings, with between 10,000 and 25,000 people attending the Sept. 9 action and thousands getting arrested.

Of course, not all of those who participated were in “civil disobedience mode,” Julien explained. But they were all there to support the blockades, creating a striking visual demonstration of strength. To him, this two-tier system — one in which there were both people actually blocking the road and supporters standing alongside of them — was crucial. “You create a model of society there,” he said. “There are so many people who feel supportive, but don’t want to actually be the person on the streets. So creating that scene is far more than just logistics.” The well-functioning ladder of engagement and successful escalation of protests created daily press coverage and ramped up pressure for politicians to respond.

In October 2023, the campaign achieved an important symbolic victory when the Dutch parliament pushed forward a motion requiring the Minister of Climate to propose pathways to lawmakers that would phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The motion’s success allowed activists to end their intensive period of daily protests on a positive note. Because the intensity of this protest period would have been impossible to sustain indefinitely, the organizers were smart to be able to recognize an opportunity to claim a win. Subsequently, they could move their campaign into a period of rest and recovery.

When parliament announced the motion, “that’s basically the moment where [the group] … said, ‘Right, this is the one we’re going to catch and pull the plug on as a victory,’” Julien explained.

Allowing for decentralized leadership while rejecting pure horizontalism

A third significant lesson from the A12 efforts relates to how leadership functioned in the campaign. The campaign followed a distributed leadership model that allowed for decentralization but rejected pure horizontalism.

Decisions about launching and managing the A12 blockades were not made by a centralized committee of XR NL. Rather, it arose from a model in which core teams of activists are given autonomy to design their own campaigns, and participants are allowed to democratically “vote with their feet” in deciding which drives they want to participate in. In this model, those who are successful in designing and leading specific campaigns earn the right to exercise considerable leadership as those campaigns unfold. At the same time, they cannot claim to represent the whole of the organization, and others are free to launch projects of their own.

This leadership model can be controversial, especially among advocates of general assemblies, consensus decision-making, and pure horizontalism. However, it has distinct advantages and can be seen as a way to recognize the initiative and intensive commitment of a core team, while also allowing widespread participation and fueling grassroots initiative to generate other projects.

The primary direction of the A12 campaign was carried out by a core team of approximately a half dozen individuals. These leaders were each given responsibility over key areas of the campaign and delegated work within their area to incoming volunteers. Nantermoz remarked: “The balance between decentralization and a core-driven control structure is, I think, what made the A12 strong and different from most XR campaigns. We had this approach both within the campaign and with the rest of the movement.” Douglas Rogers noted that international observers, such as Marina Hagen-Canaval, a spokesperson for Last Generation Austria, attribute “a lot of significance to an XR NL decision to designate a core team with a mandate for organizing the A12 actions, as a way of streamlining decisions.”

Core team member Nantermoz explained that the core “delegated a lot to rebels,” a term the campaign used to refer to committed activists, who had specific roles and responsibilities, and “also the freedom to do it in their own way.” Hofstede added: “One person was doing everything around posters and flyers and stuff like that. So the other five of us had nothing to do with that… Another person was involved with action trainings and getting those organized.” Being responsible for a given area, however, could also mean getting others involved, she notes. “We all had our own little parts and made sure that it [all] happened, not by doing it all by ourselves, but by making sure it happens.”

Nantermoz contended that, while not free of disagreement, the core group benefited from complementary qualities and a shared vision. “We managed to balance each other out,” she said. “And that was something that was really successful; there was a lot of trust.” The fact that they didn’t have to check up on one another allowed them to keep planning meetings short. “We only spoke to each other one hour a week,” she recalled, “and the rest of the week, every one of us would do our own thing.”

Importantly, the core team structure allowed the A12 campaign to stick to their one key demand and maintain a focused message, even though there was pressure to add on other items to what they were fighting for. Tessel Hofstede attributed much of the campaign’s success to their ability to “always bring [the focus] back to one simple demand that a lot of people can agree with.” Nantermoz echoed these remarks: “If you just focus on one thing,” she argued, “it’s a lot more likely that [supporters] will stick to it.”

Over time, internal debates emerged in the movement about the scope of the core team’s mandate to lead on the A12 campaign. Nantermoz noted that the core team “did what we thought was necessary. And some people within the movement didn’t like that, and definitely thought we had too much power.” In particular, “During the summer [of 2023], there were a lot of meetings about this that were quite intense,” she said, “where you would talk for hours about mandates and organizing and just not go anywhere.”

In the campaign’s period of rest and recovery after the fall 2023 climax, most of the core team members decided to step back, allowing new leadership to take over the A12 efforts. Several of the previous core organizers decided instead to move on to launching new campaigns, including one focused on the Dutch financial institution ING and its funding of fossil fuel projects.

After the whirlwind

The combination of a strong demand, a successful plan of escalation, and effective leadership allowed the A12 blockades to become landmark actions. Lucas Winnips told Democracy Now! in October 2023: “During this campaign, we achieved a transformation, I think, of Dutch society, with three-quarters of the people now wanting a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, and even a third of the people wanting an immediate stop on fossil fuel subsidies.”

Anytime a moment of the whirlwind occurs, its impact must be tracked over the long term. The shifting of the political landscape in a given area can have many implications, not just around a single policy demand, but in terms of how it affects the social movement ecosystem, how climate advances are pursued within various pillars of society, and how wins in one place can reverberate in other localities and other countries. For this reason, it will be some time before the full implications of the A12 whirlwind are understood.

Gains by the populist right in November 2023 elections and the ultimate formation of a right-wing coalition government in the Netherlands in the summer of 2024 has created uncertainty about how Dutch policy around fossil fuel subsidies will play out. Yet because of high public support for the demand of ending subsidies, the right did not overtly campaign against it, focusing instead on issues such as immigration. Although activists are critical of their government for posturing rather than taking concrete action, the Netherlands positioned itself at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last December as the leader of a coalition of nations committed to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

In 2024, protests on the A12 highway have resumed. These included a mass action in April in which 400 people were arrested, among them prominent Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Simultaneous actions in more than a half dozen countries across Europe took place that same day, with organizers announcing a coordinated international campaign to push their respective governments to move on the subsidies issue.

Julien believes that, in addition to being a demand with widespread appeal, it is also one with radical implications. “If you’re a bit more revolutionary in your attitude,” he explained, “You’re thinking, ‘I’m really sticking it to these industries, because they’re all screwed without the subsidies. They have no business case.’” By pursuing the end of public support for the fossil fuel industry, the A12 campaign showed an important path toward bigger climate victories. Or, as Julien puts it: “If you can flip this, then the whole system starts to move.”

This article How mass protest created a breakthrough on the climate crisis in the Netherlands was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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