The shifts were already happening in the early 2000s: simultaneously in different parts of the world many rights activists had become fed up with banging their heads on the walls of law and policy reform. It was expensive, state-centred, involved convincing the powerful which just bolstered their power. Instead, activists started focusing more on attitudes and behaviour. After decades of critiquing the behaviour of others, they started first changing their own behaviour and encouraging people immediately around them, in their families and neighbourhoods, to question theirs too. Far more difficult but much more transformative. It wasn’t a religious process (although for some religion played a positive role) but it was a shift in ethics that helped build a critical mass which made absolutism irrelevant and transformed structures. It had nothing to do with the British Government’s Big Society concept: millions were already engaged in voluntary work and the Big Society was not about transforming society towards pluralist democracy. But the global financial crisis did play a role because it forced activists who had lost secure donor funding to focus on the most effective priorities, on mobilisation, autonomy, contextual solutions and above all on understanding how change happens.