George Ferns learned about the fossil fuel divestment movement as a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Ferns became interested in People & Planet, the United Kingdom’s largest student network for human rights and environmental justice as a researcher who wanted to understand the group’s ambitious agenda and accomplishments. How, he wondered, did environmental campaigners gain traction in their efforts to tarnish the fossil fuel industry, one of business’s most massive and powerful incumbents?

Ferns, now a lecturer in organization studies and sustainability at Cardiff University Business School, teamed up with Aliette Lambert, a lecturer in management, marketing, business, and society at the University of Bath’s Centre for Qualitative Research, and Maik Günther, a doctoral candidate in the School of Business and Economics at the Freie Universität Berlin, to investigate how exactly climate activists successfully stigmatized the fossil fuel industry, a victory of David over Goliath.

The three researchers conducted interviews with activists and other central players in the global divestment movement and scrutinized their discursive practices. Sifting through a corpus of 342 texts produced between 2011 and 2017 by climate activists—most distributed by 350.org, a climate action group founded by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, and student-led campaigns such as People & Planet—the authors examined the power of language and moral suasion.

Read the full article about the divestment movement by Daniela Blei at Stanford Social Innovation Review