Building Coalitions: If Not through Mutual Interests, then through Mutual Gains

It’s easy to say that we need to build broad coalitions to bring about sustainable pro-poor change.  Easier said than done.   In a piece entitled “Connecting Nature’s Dots”, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues that

“We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately.  The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to diversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.”

Why the disconnect?  One of the reasons Friedman and his interviewees offer is that when it comes to environmental preservation, the farther humans are from experiencing nature, the harder it is for us to make the connections among environmental issues and other relevant policy and practice domains. 

This makes intuitive sense.  For those of us who live in fast-paced urban environments, surrounded by mass produced goods bearing little resemblance to their original raw materials and technology that allows us to follow instant updates of 200+ of our "friends", we hardly have the time to purposefully connect the dots.  Isn’t it ironic that efforts made to stay connected, arguably a good thing in itself, can result in our losing sight of connections?

This insight is also applicable to building coalitions for reform in the environmental movement or in governance more generally.  Specialists in various disciplines and professional sectors work incessantly to generate and disseminate new information and knowledge, repackage what we already know, and push all this good stuff at each other at a constantly accelerating pace.  Given this context, perhaps now more than ever, building multisectoral coalitions requires creating spaces for potential coalition partners to first slow down and take stock of each other’s work and the environments in which they operate. 

If we really dig into the initial positions of various stakeholders, we may also find that they may be more disconnected than connected.  Some positions are seemingly irreconcilable, such as between those who believe that economic growth should be prioritized vs. those who advocate social protection first, or those who believe a country’s health care system is broken vs. those who believe things are generally OK.  Fundamental disagreements obviously don’t lend themselves to coalition building.  As Lawrence Susskind (2006, p. 273) notes, “… dialogue, no matter how skillfully managed, is unlikely to produce agreement in situations in which fundamental values are at stake."  It is perhaps even likely that competing coalitions will form in such situations. 

But some seemingly intractable disagreements may be worth scrutinizing more deeply and zones of possible agreement expanded more purposefully, especially if the parties involved have the potential to make significant contributions to the effort.  For instance, wouldn’t it be helpful to have specialists in public-private partnerships and social safety nets working together toward poverty alleviation?  Susskind (ibid., p. 269) describes a promising approach in this direction: “… ’mutual gains’ negotiation, or what is now called consensus building (wherein) parties seek to make mutually advantageous trades – offering their ‘votes’ in exchange for a modification of what is being proposed or for a promise of support on other issues."

Whether built and held together via explicitly shared interests, strategic trade-offs,  tactical moves, or a combination thereof, coalitions offer benefits that can only be derived from linking up areas of diverse expertise and experience.  In addition, it is critical to find ways in which coalition members can stay connected while always keeping sight of the connections, whether based on mutual interests or mutual gains.

Photo credit: Flickr user jmurawski