When I was approached for a feature on my climate activism work, particularly with Students for a Fossil Free Future (S4F), the last thing one probably expected was for me to break the news that the movement was slowing down.
Some say this was a long time coming; we had struggled with sustaining recruitment and momentum for our Fossil Free chapters since launching our first campaign in 2017. Our initial plans to expand the student-led fossil fuel divestment movement into the other local universities beyond liberal arts college Yale-NUS, which has since closed grew increasingly difficult. We had heard this sentiment countless times: in Singapore, how can we expect to change an institution so huge when we were all but a group of students?
Many may have forgotten the rich and electrifying legacy of student movements in Singapore – where youths fought for causes that they believed in, sometimes bearing consequences for their actions. In 1954, 900 students from Chinese middle schools walked in solidarity with eight student representatives to the British Governor Office to hand over a petition for National Service exemptions, which ultimately ended in a violent clash with riot police, though it also managed to successfully resist attempts at compulsory conscription efforts by the colonial government. The equivalent of today’s National University of Singapore Students’ Union (NUSSU) led a public campaign in the 1970s to collect signatures challenging a government-imposed bus fare hike.
This legacy lives on till today: earlier this year, 124 students and alumni staged a memorial in NUS in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. They mourned and honoured Palestinian students murdered in Israel’s warfare and genocide in Gaza, and called for Singapore universities to reconsider ties with Israeli institutions – some who participated then had their homes raided and faced questioning by the police for organising the memorial without a permit.
I also recall the important moments from our movement: distributing flyers to students at the NUS career fair against greenwashing roles in fossil fuel companies. Many we spoke to agreed with us, that they too wanted a job that made the world better and their conscience clear. I thought about the stories of our alumni who came before us, who camped at the library, looking over their shoulders as they discussed the beginnings of 64-page report, Fossil-Fuelled Universities that we would come to publish in 2022.
On 17 January 2022, brown envelopes in hand, we delivered the report to each university office across the island exposing the ways they collaborated with the fossil fuel industry. Our findings and calls for universities to cut these harmful ties appeared on multiple national news outlets. In the next two weeks, we hosted in-person engagement sessions and reached 25,000 pairs of eyes on social media. This and more were only possible with our campaign team of more than 60 individuals.
Despite the momentum generated, the universities remained unresponsive; only NUS and the Singapore Management University (SMU) responded to us, but sidestepped our calls to re-examine institutional endorsement of the fossil fuel industry, simply pointing us to their consumption-based sustainability reports of energy reduction and recycling efforts.
In the years I took over leading the core team, we continued to battle bureaucratic obstacles, systemic restraints and cultural resistance. Organising events and initiatives at NUS is heavily guarded by red tape: simply booking a school venue requires faculty approval and in some cases, a deposit. This would not be possible as an organisation positioned chiefly to question and criticise the university’s practices.
We also struggled to enter spaces and find allies. Our invitation to the NUS Green Summit 2023 was withdrawn, with organisers from the Office of Student Affairs citing our unofficial status and concerns about appearing to “endorse our sustainability approach”.
Culturally, we recognised that we were on the spectrum of climate action that was the least palatable to the public. We faced heavy resistance from students who would shy away from the slightest hint of our anti-institutional sentiment, or our application of systemic lens that questioned the very basis of what our way of life is built on today.
I had spoken to students who resonated with our core message, but feared being associated with “the activist type”. (These risks – being “blacklisted” from government jobs or foreign students being denied work authorisation – are still very much speculative and unknown till today.) I say this knowing exactly where these concerns are coming from, and feeling the weight of changemaking. I knew exactly what we were up against: the state-sanctioned narrative of “sustainability starts with me” that strategically detracts a systemic lens from the climate discourse, a political understanding that pits being a good citizen against having a critical voice. It is because we love Singapore so deeply that we want to be better together. Many cannot, or perhaps do not want to, see this nuance.
These experiences drew us to make the call to slow our movement’s growth, and focus on being an accessible, low-stakes springboard for ground-up organising and the existing work of our local chapters. This comes from our firm belief that when the time and conditions are right, the movement will find its way back into the student activism space again, stronger and more sustainable than before.
This decision is also one that reflects the broader circumstances around organising and activism in Singapore, particularly among students. My experience is that tertiary education in Singapore does not encourage the exploration of one’s civil being – in fact, it very much disallows this. We are unable to hold anti-institutional discourse in universities today, and attempts at conversations on the death penalty, the ongoing genocide and gender issues, for example, are swiftly censored.
anticipate challenges given the inability to hold anti-institutional discourse in universities today, where attempts at conversations on the death penalty, the ongoing genocide and gender issues, for example, are swiftly censored.
Our members have since been reflecting on how we had been holding up against the broader, systemic forces against us and how our campaigning years had picked at the wall, bit by bit. It is with peace and gratitude that we leave this space where it needs to be at now, but also with exhaustion and a sense of defeat – not to any single institution, but to our pragmatism. Building a thriving, long-standing movement requires very strong, robust systems of continuous labour: this would mean having a consistent, reliable stream of interested and committed students hold up the movement year after year. We held these benchmarks for ourselves, wanting to only continue something we could sustain in a thoughtful, meaningful and regenerative way. Unfortunately, at the end of 2024, two years after the peak of our movement, the answer was a clear ‘no’.
As S4F changes in focus, we pass the baton on to other ongoing student movements on the ground to continue inviting more faces and hands into youth organising. Groups like Student Actions for Transformative Justice for example, play a crucial role in funneling new, interested members into systemic, critical means of changemaking. When we can feel the ground rumbling once again for calling out universities for their complicity with the fossil fuel industry – we will know it is time to go again, and stronger this time.
What we have created has been possible standing on the shoulders of those who have paved this path for us. Some time down the road, the next people will too stand on our shoulders, building on what we have created – the movement a culmination of every slice of ourselves we have given. That, I hope, would have been just enough.
Students for A Fossil Free Future recently published their Impact Report 2024 on their website, documenting what they have created with the community in the year. You can find it here.
