The Evolution of Coalitions: Why Flexibility Matters
Nicky Amos, Cora Buentjen and Rory Sullivan
Coalitions form in response to systemic challenges that exceed the capacity of individual actors. Whether addressing climate action, supply chain transparency, or responsible mining practices, coalitions provide the structural framework for coordinated action among businesses, civil society organisations, governments, and other stakeholders. Their purpose is to align diverse actors around shared objectives and dismantle barriers that no single entity can overcome independently.
A coalition's founding framework is rarely its final form. Chronos has managed the Secretariats of multiple coalitions across the ESG landscape, including the Investor Initiative on Mining 2030, the Global Coalition on Farm Animal Welfare (GCAW) and the Future of Sustainable Data Alliance (FoSDA), and draws on experience managing other multistakeholder initiatives and benchmarks, including the CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmarks (UK and Global), the Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare (BBFAW) and the BBFAW Global Investor Collaboration, and Climate Action 100+. Across this range of collective initiatives, a consistent pattern has emerged: those that remain effective are the ones that evolve in response to shifting conditions.
Staying Adaptable and Responsive to Change
Coalitions inevitably change over time for several reasons. First, the external operating environment is subject to continuous change: regulatory frameworks shift, market dynamics evolve, and stakeholder expectations adjust. Second, the coalition's own activities reshape the landscape it operates within, as initial objectives are achieved, or conversely, prove resistant to progress despite sustained effort. Third, membership composition itself changes; as participants join and depart, the coalition's objectives, capabilities, and strategic orientation necessarily shift in response.
Segregating Mandates and Methods
A coalition's core mandate can remain stable over time while its strategic approach and operational focus undergo transformation.
GCAW, for example, has a foundational mandate – to improve animal welfare standards at scale – which has remained consistent since its inception. However, the mechanisms through which it pursues this mandate have shifted markedly. In its early phases, GCAW focused primarily on aligning members around shared principles and high-level commitments. As the coalition matured, its strategic emphasis transitioned toward identifying and resolving structural and systemic barriers that constrain members' ability to implement their commitments.
The Investor Initiative on Mining 2030 shows the same pattern from a different starting point. It began with a research process, building the evidence base needed to define what responsible mining practice should look like, before shifting its focus to supporting members through implementation once that evidence existed. In both cases, the mandate never changed; only the work required to deliver it did.
This evolution illustrates the importance of continuously reassessing the strategic priorities of coalitions to determine which activities need to be retired, revised or added. Coalitions can benefit from structured intervals to examine their external context and assess whether existing activities remain aligned with current member needs. Without such reviews, coalitions’ activities can persist through inertia rather than being the best route to impact.
Informal and Formal Engagement Matter
Effective coalition evolution depends on continuous understanding of member circumstances and priorities. These conditions are subject to rapid change, driven by variables including regulatory developments, NGO scrutiny, commercial pressures, and internal leadership transitions. Such shifts reshape member capacity to contribute and their assessment of where collective action can generate value.
Formal coalition structures (such as working groups and scheduled meetings) provide one layer of insight, yet our experience indicates that useful insight is gained through informal, direct engagement channels. These conversations can reveal where members face implementation barriers, where they perceive opportunity for collective action, and where existing coalition activities have diverged from their needs.
The Secretariat needs to assume a strategic governance role: identifying patterns across member conversations, introducing emerging issues for consideration, and evaluating whether ongoing activities remain fit for purpose. The Secretariat must balance responsiveness to member priorities against the need to maintain coalition momentum and prevent the organisation from devolving toward consensus-driven lowest-common-denominator objectives.
Anchoring Continuity Through Change
Mining 2030, a collaborative initiative addressing responsible mining practices, illustrates the Secretariat's broader institutional function. The Secretariat extends significantly beyond administrative operations: it maintains organisational continuity as individual member representatives change and is thereby able to steer broad strategic mandates into focused and achievable programmes.
FoSDA illustrates a related dimension of this continuity function. When the coalition undertook a strategic review of its priorities, the Secretariat simultaneously supported the hiring of FoSDA's first Executive Director (ED), ensuring the coalition's strategic direction and its leadership capacity evolved in step rather than the transition to implementation stalling while a new ED found their feet.
The Secretariat is well positioned to play an impartial role in listening and bridging perspectives, not only from within the coalition, but also from external stakeholders. External stakeholder engagement fulfils several key functions. Systemic challenges require coordinated change across the broader institutional landscape. Engagement of external stakeholders also strengthens the coalition's credibility and legitimacy, anchoring the coalition's approach in emerging evidence and ensuring the strategy does not become disconnected from its operating realities.
Measuring What Matters
Coalition assessment frameworks must also adapt as coalitions mature. Process metrics (such as member participation rates, engagement in working groups) provide important indicators of how well the coalition functions. However, outcome metrics (including changes in member practice, influence on systemic conditions, progress toward stated objectives) should constitute the primary basis for evaluating coalition performance.
BBFAW illustrates this transition directly: in 2021 it introduced a deliberate new emphasis on performance – shifting its own assessment weight toward what companies had actually achieved, rather than the policies and commitments they had published – precisely because the earlier balance had allowed strong policy language to substitute for demonstrated change.
The metrics themselves may require revision as the coalition strategy evolves; assessment frameworks developed for one strategic phase may become inadequate as the coalition transitions to different priorities. Selecting the right outcome metrics also requires care, since the most visible measure of success is not always the most meaningful one. A coalition seeking to grow investor support, for example, may find itself under pressure to prioritise the number or size of investor signatories it can attract, yet what actually moves member companies to act may be a smaller number of investors with the right geographic or sector-specific leverage, rather than the largest possible pool of assets under management. Coalitions should be deliberate about which outcome their metrics are actually proxies for, rather than defaulting to whichever number is easiest to grow or most impressive to cite.
An adaptive approach to performance measurement is essential because coalition resources are finite. Activities should be retained only if they generate demonstrable benefit from collective coordination - that is, activities whose impact depends on multiple actors working collaboratively, rather than work that members could pursue independently or through alternative structures. For GCAW, such activities centre on research initiatives that aggregate member demand, the provision of neutral forum space for discussions, and the identification of systematic barriers, and useful interventions, that cut across multiple supply chains.
In practice, this means members need to be able to point to tangible outputs to justify their continued investment of time and resources. These deliverables operate on different timescales. In the short term, practical tools – templates, benchmarking data, model policies, shared position papers – save members time and improve their internal operating efficiency, offering an early, low-cost demonstration of value. Over the longer term, coalitions should also be building toward outputs that accumulate: research programmes, standards, or advocacy positions that deepen with each successive year rather than resetting with each cycle. A coalition that can point to both kinds of output, both immediate and cumulative, offers members a far stronger basis for justifying continued participation than engagement and knowledge sharing alone.
Anticipation, Not Administration, is the Rule
Coalitions exist because the challenges they address exceed what any single institution can resolve alone. But the conditions that justified a coalition's formation never hold still – external conditions shift, objectives resolve or resist, membership turns over. The coalitions that stay effective are the ones built to notice this and act on it.
