Building a movement that can take full advantage of the IRA

The Inflation Reduction Act is ambitious climate policy, but history shows that ambitious policy is not always followed by ambitious implementation. In this episode, Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University and David Beckman of the Pisces Foundation talk about Mosaic, a grant-making coalition that aims to help build a robust movement infrastructure to ensure that vulnerable and underserved groups can take full advantage of the significant funding offered by the IRA.

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David Roberts

For all that has been written about the Inflation Reduction Act, the most salient fact about it remains widely underappreciated. What is significant about the bill is not just that it sends an enormous amount of money toward climate solutions, but that the money is almost entirely uncapped.

The total amount of federal money that will be spent on climate solutions via the IRA will be determined not by any preset limit, but by demand for the tax credits. The more qualified applicants that seek them, the more will be spent. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill’s spending at $391 billion, but a report last year from Credit Suisse put the number at $800 billion and a more recent Goldman Sachs report put it closer to $1.2 trillion.

Big companies will have teams of lawyers to tell them when they qualify for the tax credits, but there are also billions of dollars in the IRA that are meant to be spent on vulnerable and underserved communities. Those communities do not typically have teams of lawyers.

Who will work to enable them to take full advantage available of the money? Getting that done will require campaigns, relationships, and grassroots mobilization. It will require movement infrastructure.

A relatively new grant-making coalition called Mosaic is attempting to help build that infrastructure by dispersing money to the frontline organizations that comprise it. Mosaic is a cooperative effort among large national environmental groups like NRDC, big foundations, and various smaller regional, often BIPOC-led groups.

It has pooled philanthropic money and thus far given almost $11 million of it to dozens of relatively small groups and campaigns — 85 percent of them BIPOC-led, 87 percent of them female-led — selected by a governing committee from well over a thousand applicants. The governing committee contains a super-majority of representatives from frontline communities; the foundations have a super-minority.

To discuss the need for movement infrastructure, the Mosaic effort, and the possibilities IRA offers for frontline communities, I contacted Dr. Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and David Beckman, one of the founders of Mosaic and the current president of the Pisces Foundation. We talked about what movement infrastructure is, the failure of the climate movement to build enough of it, and Mosaic’s theory of change.

So, without any further ado, Hahrie Han and David Beckman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Hahrie Han

Thanks so much for having us.

David Beckman

Yes, thanks David.

David Roberts

I want to start with you, Hahrie. You have written in the past, and one of the themes of your work is that social welfare legislation or policy can often fail to reach, let's say, its full potential if there isn't the sort of civic and movement infrastructure around it to help it succeed. So maybe you can just talk for a little bit about what do we mean by infrastructure here? What does infrastructure mean? And maybe also what I think would be helpful is maybe you could cite some examples of times you think legislation or reforms fell short of what they could have done because of a lack of infrastructure.

And then maybe some examples of when there was infrastructure and that was helpful.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, I think that's a great question. There are so many instances when in trying to tackle some of our stickiest social problems, we put an enormous amount of attention and effort into trying to build the coalitions that we need to pass the policies that we want. If we think about any of the landmark legislation that we've had in recent decades, from the Affordable Care Act to the IRA to any other of these big kind of efforts, they've taken years or decades even to pass because of all the work that it takes to get them through. But then what so much research and so much history has taught us is that if there isn't the same kind of effort that goes into the implementation, that the gains that we made with policy alone are really fragile.

There's one famous book that looks at some of these gains, these policy wins, and calls them a "hollow hope" if they're not accompanied by the kind of infrastructure that you're talking about. And we just have a lot of those kind of examples throughout history. So to give a couple of them. For example, this book, "The Hollow Hope," starts with landmarks court legislation like Brown v. Board of Education, where, if you actually look at the ability of that one decision by the Supreme Court to actually translate into integration on the ground. It didn't actually achieve its goals, and its actual outcomes felt really hollow until you saw this mobilization of a lot of the school districts and parents and communities on the ground to make real the promises that were in that Supreme Court hearing.

David Roberts

That particular example is kind of telling since that infrastructure withered a little bit and now those gains are being reversed. So it's not just a one time thing like sort of implementing it and making it real is perpetual effort.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, I think that's a great point, right, because the thing that I always like to remind people is that any policy gains that we have are really fragile because they can always be reversed on the one hand, as you point out. But then also because oftentimes when policy gets implemented, it drifts away from what the original goals are. There's a famous political scientist, Jacob Hacker at Yale who looked a lot at basically welfare policy and a lot of social policies. And what he finds is that if you look at the impact of those policies on people's lives, that often there's a big gap between what legislators intended and what actually happened because of that process of drift.

And that I think is also a really important point because what it tells us is that you don't need Congress to take another action to reverse policy gains, but in fact, it can just be ignoring a process that can lea to that kind of drift.

David Roberts

Entropy, basically. Like if you're not continually reinforcing it, it naturally will start to erode.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, exactly. That there's just kind of natural chaos in the system. Or sometimes there are people that are actively working to undermine the ability to achieve those goals.

David Roberts

Yes.