Creating Real Change for Animals: Why We Need to Think Bigger

Advocating for animals is a deeply compassionate thing to do. Every act of activism comes from a place of wanting to build a better world for animals. This article explores how and why it is worth focusing more on the institutional approach to our advocacy—a strategy that can create large-scale, lasting change.

If the term ‘institutional approach’ feels divorced from the day-to-day lives of animals, or on-the-ground campaigning, read on. This explainer draws on the journal article Institutional Change and the Limitations of Consumer Activism, summarising the key takeaways and adding a few insights as to why the institutional approach is such an important and transformative tool. 

What Is an Institution, and What Is the Institutional Approach?

Institutions are the laws, practices, and organisations that shape how society operates. Examples include governments, companies, and even activist movements. The institutional approach focuses on changing these systems—through policies and corporate commitments—rather than asking individuals to make lifestyle changes. In contrast, the individual approach aims to encourage people to adopt behaviours like switching to free-range chicken or going vegan.

Building on Individual Advocacy

Animal activists have played a crucial role in raising awareness and sparking conversations about animal suffering. The institutional approach builds on this work by creating systemic changes that make it easier for everyone to align their actions with compassion and sustainability.

10 Reasons to Prioritise the Institutional Approach:

1. Learning from History – Many social movements have had success shifting focus to push for systemic change. For example:
   • The environmental movement moved from promoting recycling to advocating for government regulations and industry taxes.
   • The abolition of slavery, minimum wage laws, women’s suffrage, and the creation of smoke-free public spaces were all driven by institutional changes, not just individual actions.

2. Impact of Individual Efforts – The collective actions of individuals are essential to achieving meaningful change for farmed animals. However, when undertaken in isolation from institutional change, the impacts of individual efforts are more limited. For example, thanks to awareness-raising campaigns, demand for cage eggs has decreased over the years. But “colony” cage eggs are still sold in some New Zealand supermarkets and bought by consumers, often unknowingly.
3. Avoiding Defensive Reactions – Individual-focused activism can sometimes make people feel judged, which can lead to anger and defensiveness. Highlighting personal hypocrisy or speciesism often creates resistance rather than reflection.
4. Tapping into Moral Outrage – The institutional approach channels the phenomenon of moral outrage (which is always a reaction to others’ behaviour, not our own) toward systems and practices, not individuals. For example, fair trade campaigns focus on corporations that run sweatshops, rather than blaming consumers. This makes advocacy less confrontational and more persuasive. 
5. Proven Success – Campaigning organisations like The Humane League and Animals Aotearoa have made real progress through initiatives like the Better Chicken Commitment, which pressures companies to improve animal welfare.

6. Creating Public Support for Policy Change – Two-thirds of those polled in an independent Horizon Research survey on chicken labelling said the welfare of the chickens was important to them when buying meat (only 7% disagreed). But the poll also found deceptive labels are misleading shoppers into buying meat from chickens that actually come from overcrowded factory farms. This gap highlights the potential of institutional change to align public policy with existing values. 
7. Proven Success: Alternative Proteins – The rise of alternative proteins is an example of the institutional approach working:
   • Plant-based products like Impossible Burger.
   • Cultivated meat, such as chicken nuggets made from meat cultivated from a tiny sample of the cells of a real chicken, that outperforms traditional chicken in taste tests. 
   • Precision fermentation, which involves genetically engineering fungus to produce chemically real yogurt, cheese, meat, and eggs.
8. Making It Accessible – It is hard to make higher welfare choices when those options are difficult to access. The institutional approach creates environments where it is much easier to take individual action.
9. Combining Efforts – The institutional and individual approaches work together. Campaigns that show the realities of animal agriculture, like those by the Farm Transparency Project, can inspire personal and systemic change.
10. Paving the Way for Long-Term Change – By tackling systemic barriers, the institutional approach creates a foundation for cultural shifts that make compassionate choices easier.

Conclusion

Activism focused on individual change has laid an important foundation for the animal advocacy movement, sparking awareness and driving conversations. But to create the large-scale, lasting change that the animals urgently need, it’s time to shift more toward institutional change. By targeting systemic barriers and reshaping norms, we can amplify the impact of individual efforts and make compassion the default.