Summary
The deliberate work of bringing distinct organisations and constituencies together behind a shared campaign demand — the move from single-organisation to coalition power.
Body
The deliberate work of bringing distinct organisations and constituencies together behind a shared campaign demand — the move from single-organisation to coalition power.
A coalition is a formal or informal alignment of distinct organisations pursuing a shared campaign demand. The SFAF manual on popular mobilisation treats coalition-building as central to any mass campaign in Latin America [source: sfaf-movilizacion]. CIVICUS’s framework for civil-society alliance-building emphasises clarity of demand, division of roles, and shared accountability [source: civicus]. The spectrum of allies is the operational map that tells the coalition which actors to bring in and in what order [source: spectrum-of-allies]. Citizen lobbying is the policy-engagement angle — many coalitions are formed specifically to lobby a common target [source: citizen-lobbying]. The hardest part is rarely building the coalition — it is keeping it together through the inevitable disagreements on strategy and credit. The strongest coalitions agree on governance (who decides, who speaks, who gets credit, who funds the next round) before they agree on demands.
Use it for
Recruiting coalition partners for a new campaign; structuring decision-making in an existing coalition; sequencing coalition recruitment to a public launch.
Worked examples
- case-studies/campact-model
- case-studies/sindicato-inquilinas
- case-studies/sunrise-green-new-deal
Related
- power-mapping
- spectrum-of-allies
- stakeholder-analysis
- citizen-lobbying
- governance
- coalition-building
- civicus
- sfaf-movilizacion
- thinkers/grover-norquist
- thinkers/marshall-ganz
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- sources/sfaf-movilizacion — grounding: secondary — unfetchable
- sources/civicus — grounding: secondary — RAW (958 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.