Advocacy, in its classical form, follows a familiar arc: a problem is identified, evidence is marshalled, a solution is proposed, and decision-makers are persuaded of its merits. This sequence presupposes a world of discrete, addressable problems — a contaminated water source, a discriminatory statute — traceable to identifiable causes and correctable through argument directed at the appropriate authority. It sits uneasily, however, with the problems that now define the present era — climate change, agrarian distress, structural inequality — which are better understood as conditions sustained by interlocking economic, political, and cultural forces that derive continuing benefit from their own persistence. Arguing at the surface of such systems while their roots continue to deepen beneath the argument is a poor use of advocacy's limited energy, however rigorous the argument or compelling the evidence behind it. What is required is not a more refined version of the existing toolkit, but a different mode of engagement: one that treats entrenched systems not as audiences to be persuaded but as structures to be destabilised at their point of dependency.
Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation supplies a useful frame. Bower and Christensen (1995) observed that transformative industry change rarely originates from incumbents, who are structurally inclined toward sustaining improvements their existing customers already value. It tends instead to emerge from the margins, in products initially cheaper and simpler than the industry standard, which nonetheless undercut the logic on which the incumbent industry rests. Disruption in this sense is not destruction for its own sake; it is the strategic breaking of a dependency, clearing ground that argument alone has failed to contest.
Solar energy illustrates the dynamic clearly. Fossil fuel dependency was never a merely technical problem awaiting a superior alternative; it is a system of infrastructure, capital, employment, and political influence that actively maintains itself. Decades of advocacy for cleaner energy were absorbed or delayed by this system. Solar did not argue its way past incumbency — it became cheap and distributed enough to shatter the assumption that centralised generation was the only viable path to electrification, with prices falling roughly a third for every doubling of global capacity (Our World in Data, 2024). That disruption had a second-order effect worth noting: it also closed off the case for small-scale nuclear reactors, whose costs, unlike solar's, have tended to rise rather than fall with cumulative deployment (Wealer et al., 2024). A single disruption thus eliminated a costly, decades-long detour as effectively as it displaced the original incumbent — evidence that breaking a path is often more consequential than building a new one prematurely.
This matters because contemporary problems are rarely confined to one discipline. Rittel and Webber's (1973) classic distinction between "tame" problems, solvable by conventional method, and "wicked" ones, whose boundaries and causes are themselves contested and interdependent, captures why well-evidenced, single-discipline solutions so often fail in practice: not for lack of merit, but for want of disruption sufficient to outlast the forces that will otherwise absorb or redirect them. A legal victory that ignores the economic incentives routing around it, or a technology that displaces one harm while triggering governance failures elsewhere, has relocated the problem rather than resolved it. Advocacy conducted in only one register is, by definition, insufficient to a problem constituted across several.
A further principle follows: disruptive solutions need not be perfect, only sufficient. Electric vehicles are instructive here. Their full lifecycle footprint is genuinely mixed — battery manufacturing is resource-intensive, and charging still draws substantially on fossil generation (Degen & Schütte, 2022) — yet they are structurally displacing the internal combustion engine in a way decades of efficiency standards and carbon taxes did not, by redirecting capital and expectation toward an alternative paradigm. The task for advocacy is not to treat the EV as a destination but as a wedge, to be followed by cleaner grids and reduced car dependency generally.
Synthetic textiles supply the cautionary counterpart. They disrupted dependency on natural fibres by being cheaper and more versatile, democratising clothing access — but in doing so quietly installed a new dependency on petrochemicals, and are now recognised as a major source of ocean microplastic pollution through washing-machine shedding (Carney Almroth et al., 2018). Disruption unguided by attention to its downstream consequences risks merely relocating harm. The task of disruptive advocacy is therefore not only to break dependency but to remain active through the transition it opens, ensuring what replaces the old system is demonstrably better rather than merely different.
This logic extends naturally beyond energy and transport. Indian agriculture offers a further case, illustrated by the Save Our Rice Campaign, launched by the Kerala-based organisation Thanal in 2004. The Green Revolution replaced an extraordinarily diverse base of farmer-selected rice varieties — India once cultivated well over a hundred thousand distinct landraces — with a small number of high-yielding cultivars descended from IR8 (Mackill & Khush, 2018), leaving cultivation more genetically uniform and correspondingly more exposed to pest, disease, and climate shocks. The campaign disrupts this not through purchased inputs but through their absence: farmers exchange indigenous seed directly, returning double what they borrowed the following season, propagating several hundred varieties through community seed banks across at least six states without depending on continuing government subsidy for its survival. Its structural advantage lies precisely there — a horizontal, farmer-run infrastructure has proved more durable across changes in state government than top-down programmes typically are, even as its present scale, dependent substantially on premium urban markets rather than commodity pricing, remains modest against national rice cultivation as a whole. The lesson recurs: the honest acknowledgement of present limits is itself part of responsible disruptive advocacy.
A comparable choice recurs in infrastructure — between capital concentrated in prestige corridors and capability distributed more broadly. India's rural roads programme, PMGSY, connected over a hundred million previously unconnected people and raised real consumption measurably, though later research found its income effects more modest than first claimed (Aggarwal, 2018; Asher & Novosad, 2020). Against this, the country's first high-speed rail corridor has seen its projected cost rise some eighty per cent since sanction, funded substantially through central budgetary support, for a single line connecting two already well-connected cities. A similar pattern holds for aviation against rail and bus: national rail runs at roughly a seventh of the emissions intensity of domestic flight (Ritchie, 2023), while serving a far broader ridership. None of this suggests concentrated infrastructure lacks a legitimate role — only that capital and attention gravitate toward the visible project, in a manner strikingly analogous to the earlier preference for nuclear reactors over distributed solar, even where the distributed alternative shows a more favourable ratio of reach to cost.
Several operating principles recur across these cases. Advocacy should locate the embedded force sustaining a problem — who benefits from its continuity, and what infrastructure, physical or institutional, keeps it in place — rather than treating its surface symptom as the target. It should identify the point of structural fragility that even entrenched systems possess: an assumption they cannot afford to have questioned, a dependency they cannot readily replace. It should pursue disruption at a scale sufficient to be irreversible, since pilot programmes and marginal adjustments are typically absorbed by the systems they were meant to challenge rather than displacing them. And it should remain active through the resulting transition, since disruption left unguided — as with synthetic textiles — can simply install a new dependency in place of the old one, while disruption that requires no continuing institutional favour, as the Save Our Rice Campaign illustrates, can instead build the kind of durable parallel infrastructure capable of expanding on its own terms.
None of this amounts to a case for recklessness. Disruptive advocacy remains constructive throughout: it breaks the existing pathway precisely so that a better one can be built where it stood, and it requires an honest, unsentimental account of power — of who benefits from a system's continuity, and what would be required to make that continuity untenable. What runs through solar power, electric vehicles, synthetic textiles, seed sovereignty movements in agriculture, and the choice between concentrated and distributed infrastructure is the same underlying recognition — that transforming deeply embedded systems requires more than the accumulation of better argument. It requires organised, multi-disciplinary intervention capable of rendering the old path genuinely less viable than the new one, and sustained enough attention through the transition that follows to ensure the new dependency, if one forms, is demonstrably better than the one it replaced. The path toward a more sustainable and equitable settlement does not run through the systems that presently obstruct it. It runs, as each of these cases suggests, through their disruption.
References
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a researcher, campaigner, and an environmental justice activist. He is a columnist too. He advises the Climate Action program for Centre for Earth Leadership and Sustainability (CELS). He has been associated as a volunteer for the campaign for equity and justice for several campaigns at different levels in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and India, since 1987. As part of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) India, he provides social, technical and legal advice to pesticide poisoning communities. His writings and campaigns inform and capacitate people on environmental violations of governments and industries and ways to secure justice. He has been a passionate international campaigner on the climate crisis, ecology, and the environment. For more information about the work of this author, see his full profile.
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