Advocacy With A Joyful Heart: A Case Study of Navdanya’s Twenty Years of Activism
Abstract
For over 30 years, Dr. Vandana Shiva has been advocating for protection of India’s biodiversity through seed saving, the promotion of organic agriculture, and activism aimed at reducing the corporate influences in the Indian food supply. For the last 20 years, she has been the completing this work at the helm of the non-profit advocacy organization Navdanya. For six months in 2009, I was fortunate to be able to spend my internship working with Navdanya at their New Delhi office. During that time I helped with numerous activism actions and was able to get a general impression of the way campaigns are planned and executed. The following paper is an overview of some of the many campaigns from Navdanya’s twenty year history. While this is not meant to be a definitive synopsis of all of Navdanya’s work, it serves as a general history in order to inform the reader of the variety of work being carried out as well as provide a basis for evaluation.