Coalition-Building Process Between Socially Heterogeneous Organizations in Japanese Biodiversity Movements

This paper explores how and why social movement organizations build coalitions from the perspective of multi-organizational fields, with a particular focus on coalitions between socially heterogeneous organizations. While researching the interaction between social movements and their opponents, most scholars tend to pay less attention to coalitions/alliances between other movement groups or organizations in different sectors, despite suggesting their importance in social movement dynamics. In this paper, existing analytical approaches toward inter-organizational coalition/alliance—namely “coalition work” (Staggenborg 1986), “mesomobilization” (Gerhards & Rucht 1992), and “resource dependence perspective” (from the sociology of the organization)—are comparatively examined and tested in a case study. This paper attempts to reorder the determinants of coalition building proposed by these analyses.

              The case study examines the environmental movements in Japan, particularly organizations involved in advocacy activities for conservation of biodiversity since the 2000s. These biodiversity issues involve many different sub-issues—for example, preservation of wildlife, sustainable development, access to genetic resources and benefit sharing, and biosafety of living modified organisms―whereby coalitions among many different actors have been critically important. The following specific movements are reported in this paper: (1) movements for alien fish problems in the early 2000s, in which environmental citizen groups, and fisheries associations, and academic committees built some coalitions, against sports fishing groups (2) nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs) alliance for the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/COP 10) in Nagoya city during 2010, in which there was coalition building between environmental NGOs, grassroots groups, consumer organizations, and business companies. In discussing these cases, I focus on the interaction between framings and counter-framings, and on resources distribution among these actors.