Protopia Lab helps organisations develop environmental, communications, and civil society strategies that reach the people mainstream approaches leave behind.
Environmental campaigns, sustainability strategies, and public interest communications overwhelmingly speak to a liberal, urban, highly-educated audience. They are structurally unable to reach conservative, rural, working-class, and tradition-oriented communities — people who are often the actual stewards of the land and natural resources, and whose support is essential for any policy that requires broad democratic consent.
The environmental movement is currently caught between two failing approaches. On one side, major NGOs continue to rely on climate emergency and crisis narratives that alienate and disempower people who are already sceptical of grand institutional claims. On the other, attempts to reframe climate action in terms of energy security and affordability are not working either.
The same pattern repeats beyond the environment. Depolarisation initiatives, media trust programmes, and anti-disinformation campaigns across Europe are failing or actively backfiring — because they misdiagnose the problem. They treat a crisis of institutional trust as a crisis of public ignorance.
Protopia Lab works with organisations that want to do better: to understand why their current strategies are not reaching the people they most need to reach, and to develop approaches that are honest, effective, and capable of building trust across the social divide.
Mainstream environmental organisations consistently fail to reach conservative voters, rural communities, faith groups, farming families, hunters, and the many people with traditional values who feel a deep attachment to place and landscape.
We help organisations develop environmental strategies grounded in stewardship, intergenerational responsibility, and love of home — rather than guilt, catastrophism, or transactional economic arguments.
Many organisations today struggle to communicate effectively with people who have lost trust in the institutions that claim to represent them.
We help organisations develop communications strategies that take seriously the concerns of ordinary people — on immigration, institutional trust, cultural change, and the cost of living — without surrendering intellectual rigour.
Many civil society organisations across Europe have undergone significant ideological narrowing over the past decade. Protopia Lab provides confidential strategic assessments of where institutional capture has occurred and how it affects mission delivery.
We facilitate the difficult internal conversations that organisations find too sensitive to host alone, and help develop renewed strategies that reconnect organisations with the broader constituencies they were founded to serve.
Our consulting work is informed by ongoing research and analysis published in The Protopia Conversations:
"A better way to face climate change" — Why the current mainstream approach to climate change is ineffective and disempowering — and what an honest alternative looks like.
"The future of environmentalism is post-liberal" — The case for an environmentalism rooted in community, tradition, and stewardship rather than technocratic control.
Our consulting work is led by Micha Narberhaus, who brings an unusual combination of environmental movement experience, strategic consulting background, and intellectual independence.
Over a decade leading international environmental initiatives, including WWF-UK's One Planet Mobility programme and the Smart CSOs Lab.
Academic background in economics and business (MBA from ESADE, Master's from University of Würzburg), with earlier career in business strategy consulting.
Strategy Advisor to Our Common Home, an international organisation engaging people with traditional values in environmental stewardship.
Based in Barcelona. Working languages: English, Spanish, German, with Catalan. Networks across Europe and North America.
We'd welcome a conversation about how Protopia Lab can help.
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