What is an issue coalition?
Behind every issue there is an organization, a person or a number of organizations that want to make the issue bigger. Increasingly, this involves a partnership of several people and organizations that have found each other in a common goal and want to work together to achieve it. These organizations do not have to agree with each other on all points. That would severely limit and perhaps even destroy the possibilities for cooperation. This mainly concerns opportunistic coalitions. Even organizations that usually disagree with each other, but have found each other on that one issue, can work together. This requires courage and vision, as the Energy Agreement so beautifully shows. Ideally, coalitions become increasingly extensive as the issue moves higher up the curve and as more is written and discussed about it. The Alliance Netherlands Smoke Free! started from three funds and currently has more than ninety members. The same applies to the network organization Mediawijzer.net and the ECP. Coalitions can be homogeneous or heterogeneous in composition, depending on the members. A coalition of patient associations is often homogeneous, the aforementioned Alliance Netherlands Smoke Free! very heterogeneous: in addition to the funds, pharmaceutical companies, municipalities, sports clubs, etc. are also sitting around the table. Coalitions can also have a permanent or ad hoc character, although they will always be finite. An example of a permanent coalition is employer or employee organizations.
How do you set up a coalition?
Coalitions can be built in two ways. The most famous is the movement. This starts from scratch with two or three organizations that take an initiative together. New organizations are gradually joining that endorse the coalition's objectives and want to help achieve it through their own activities. This objective can be tightened, narrowed or broadened during the process, partly through the input of new coalition partners. Another, more top-down form of one issue coalition it is agreed. An inventory is first made of which parties should ideally be collaborated with in order to achieve the actual objective. They will then be asked whether they would like to participate and what they could do. Based on this objective, all those involved draw up a coalition agreement that states exactly what they want to achieve, when and who is responsible for this. The agreement is then signed and implemented jointly. Recent examples of this are the Energy Agreement and the Raw Materials Agreement.
Both forms of coalition building work. The choice is often related to the phase the issue is in, the urgency that is already felt at that moment and the fact whether there is already sufficient support. A disadvantage of a coalition agreement is that the impression can be created - reinforced by the word agreement - that all the work has already been done, while the activities are only being started at that moment.
Why an issue coalition?
Coalitions can develop into a new form of public-private partnership in which companies, governments and social organizations work together to formulate better policy solutions with broad social support. This broad collaboration makes it possible to work on wicked issues in areas such as healthcare, education or health. Police services, banks, insurers and IT specialists are currently working together more often in the field of cybercrime. Another well-known example is the collaboration in JOGG (Young People at a Healthy Weight), in which local governments, food manufacturers and retailers work together to tackle obesity among young people.
