Tactics, then, are isolated actions or events that take advantage of opportunities offered by the gaps within a given strategic system, although the tactician never holds onto these advantages. Tactics cut across a strategic field, exploiting gaps in it to generate novel and inventive outcomes. Tactics are usually used to spoil the running context.
Strategy is about choice, which affects outcomes. Organizations can often survive -- indeed do well -- for periods of time in conditions of relative stability, low environmental turbulence and little competition for resources. Virtually none of these conditions prevail in the modern world for great lengths of time for any organization or sector, public or private. Hence, the rationale for strategic management. The nature of the strategy adopted and implemented emerges from a combination of the structure of the organization (loosely coupled or tightly coupled), the type of resources available and the nature of the coupling it has with environment and the strategic objective being pursued.
Strategy is adaptable by nature rather than rigid set of instructions. In some situations it takes the nature of emergent strategy. The simplest explanation of this is the analogy of a sports scenario. If a football team were to organize a plan in which the ball is passed in a particular sequence between specifically positioned players, their success is dependent on each of those players both being present at the exact location, and remembering exactly when, from whom and to whom the ball is to be passed; moreover that no interruption to the sequence occurs. By comparison, if the team were to simplify this plan to a strategy where the ball is passed in the pattern alone, between any of the team, and at any area on the field, then their vulnerability to variables is greatly reduced, and the opportunity to operate in that manner occurs far more often. This manner is a strategy.
The question I want to ponder today is what a long-term Progressive political strategy looks like. All progressives would agree that we need to do something about what we are doing to the environment. Let's take a look at how the question of strategy and tactics plays itself out in this arena. Recently, Greenpeace sent a ship, the Esperanza to shadow some Japanese whaling vessels. Now, the Esperanza had to turn back because of fuel issues but this is a prime example of tactical moves. There's a gap, and you exploit that gap to your ends which they did because even though they had to turn back, no small amount of ink and bandwidth was consumed in reporting on their actions and Japanese whaling in general. However, it doesn't scale well and isn't a long-term strategy. It's something you do when you can do it, namely when a whaling fleet sets sail and you're in the position to do so.
Strategy, on the other hand, is longer-term and it is this that I wish to focus on. So what would an environmental strategy look like? Let me say, at the outset, that environmental issues are not my forte'. What I know is from secondary and tertiary sources and not primary sources (meaning I don't tend to read journals written by people who studied environmental science). So there will be much to criticize in this post but the specifics are less important than the overall picture.
So, what does an environmental strategy look like? I would say that in order to formulate one, you have to look at the problem as clearly as you can. I will take just one factor to keep things simple; carbon emissions. We all know that a large part of the problem is that we burn fossil fuels to power our cars and our cities and that is just in the highly industrialized West. The big problem is still coming on-line and that is China and India. We (all of humanity) cannot afford for either China or India to live and drive huge gas-guzzling SUVs in any kind of numbers like Americans. Yet, we have no right to pull the development ladder up and say "sorry, we recognize that your two great and ancient nations represent a full-third of humanity but you got to the industrialization party too late. You really should've gotten this far in the early 20th century..." So how do we address, long-term, the issue of Third World industrialization and all of its attendant issues (deforestation is another big one which, of course, leads to species extinction) while not doing some kind of paternalistic ladder-raising? So we have three populations (American, Chinese and Indian) that need to be convinced to either accept some more inconvenience and pain (Americans--let's be honest, we could restructure our society so we don't have to drive so damn much) or to take a different industrialization track than the West (ideally, if they could just skip the 19th/20th century style of oil/coal power as a primary energy source this would go a long way).
Now, the technologies are out there to be used (the amount of carbon I use getting to and from work is minimal because I bicycle, take the bus and take light-rail and none of those are exotics or novel) and there's the potential of solar power to really provide the vast majority of our energy needs (get cars, buses and trucks off of fossil fuels and onto electricity, use regional solar power plants to provide power to cities and, incidentally, our vehicles except airplanes which will need to use fossil fuels for the foreseeable future). But how do we convince people to change their lives? My co-workers largely look at me as if I were insane for riding to work, yet they all say they are concerned about the environment--just before they get in their SUV to drive the five miles to their home. This is the kind of strategic thinking and talking about that I hope to see more of from Progressives.
As an aside (sort of) Barack Obama was more right than wrong when he said that for the last quarter century, the Republicans were the party of ideas. They have spent the last quarter century thinking about how to frame their political wants and desires in a way that is palpable and how to counter Liberal and Progressive voices or make them outright irrelevant. But now, it's the Progressives' turn. We have the gap in the American body politic (tactics) let's exploit it by beginning to really do evidence-based politics where we try to come up with real solutions for real world problems.
Cheers
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