Case Studies on Coalition Building for Environmental Issues: Keys to Successful Activism
The current global political landscape is dominated by a widening array of issues that are hyper polarized by politicians and citizens alike. These conditions have made it difficult for people to unite and achieve tangible, positive progress on important global issues, and environmentalism is no exception. For people and organizations around the world to solve major environmental issues, they need to engage in effective coalition building to galvanize an increasingly diverse population under a common environmental goal, such as conserving a forest preserve or limiting toxic pollutants from automobiles. While coalition building across a plethora of ideologically different stakeholders can be difficult, especially in regards to the environment, it has proven to be an effective way to achieve successful environmental legislative and advocacy outcomes.
Below are three case studies of environmental coalition building, with varying degrees of successful outcomes, which can help identify the key factors future environmental movements need to employ to achieve their goals.
Case Study #1: The Sierra Club’s Expansion Beyond Environmentalism. Verdict - Unsuccessful
The Sierra Club is one of the United States’ oldest and most influential environmental organizations, advocating for conservation and climate change solutions for well over 100 years. However, the organization has fallen on hard times over the past few years, as their membership has decreased over 60% since 2019 and the organization faces a budget deficit in the tens of millions of dollars. Countless people postulated how a leading environmental group could collapse so suddenly, but many journalists and conservationists pointed to the Club’s expansion beyond environmental issues fracturing its core environmentally-focused members. Suddenly, an organization dedicated solely to environmental issues started incorporating a litany of non-environmental issues into their advocacy such as racial justice, labor rights, and marriage equality among others. While these are certainly important issues, they are not all appealing to the ideologically diverse group of Sierra Club members who signed up solely to focus on environmental issues, not all progressive issues.
Case Study #2: Worldwide Environmental Pledges Under the Paris Agreement. Verdict - Somewhat Successful
The Paris Agreement is a landmark international treaty on climate change, where 194 countries across the world pledged to take significant environmental action to combat climate change. The goal of the agreement is to make sure the global surface temperature does not rise over 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, limiting the potential catastrophic effects of climate change. On one hand, the Paris Agreement is a great example for environmental coalition building, since almost 200 countries put aside their differences to unite under the common goal of mitigating climate change. However, the success of the Paris Agreement is limited by the lack of concrete action and enforcement abilities of the pledges made by all the countries. The Paris Agreement allows countries to set their own climate change policies, and there is no penalty if they do not achieve emission reduction goals previously agreed upon. These unenforceable pledges, which continue to hinder global climate change policy discussions, fail to create the strong action needed to mitigate worldwide climate change. So while the Paris Agreement succeeds in its ability to unite a diverse group of stakeholders under a common goal, the focus on pledges over tangible initiatives restricts its overall effectiveness.
Case Study #3: Community Pushback on AI Data Centers. Verdict - Very Successful
Over the past two years, the United States has experienced a rapid adoption and scaling of artificial intelligence. AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are seemingly omnipresent in the digital world, but these artificial intelligence programs are making their impact felt in the real world as well through the construction of massive data centers. Tech companies are racing to build new data centers to power their AI tools, but these data centers come at a high environmental cost. Currently US data centers, which typically span hundreds of acres, use more electricity than the country of Ireland, and are projected to triple their electricity generation by 2028. On top of these gargantuan energy demands, large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to a small city of 50,000 people.
Only a few months ago, the construction of countless environmentally detrimental AI data centers seemed inevitable. However, a strong environmental activism movement has emerged to completely halt the expansion of data centers. Currently, tons of communities across the United States are successfully defeating local propositions to build new data centers. Small towns are rallying a broad group of people, including farmers, suburban families, environmental activists, and local businessmen, all of whom share few overlapping political or social viewpoints, to fight the common enemy of data centers moving into their backyard. Not only do these people share the same desire to limit data center expansion, they are taking concrete action in local government to achieve their goals, such as voting down propositions and rezoning petitions that would have otherwise allowed for the construction of new data centers. The countless local movements to oppose AI data centers are achieving success by not only uniting a diverse group of stakeholders, but taking strong legal action through local government to officially block any construction of new data centers in the community.
Conclusion
The three case studies above paint a picture of the successes, failures, and limitations of different environmental activism movements. In these examples, certain themes of successful activism are evident:
Coalitions needs to center various people/groups/etc under one issue, not the other way around.
The reason the Sierra Club issue expansion was less successful than the Paris Agreement or the community pushback on AI data centers, was due to the fact that they tried to get one group of people to fight a variety of issues. For environmental activism to succeed, all types of stakeholders must center behind one overarching issue, as this prevents the coalition from splintering on different issues.
United groups need to commit to executing on tangible actions, not ideas.
The Paris Agreement, while successful, is more limited in its impact than the community pushback on AI data centers because of its climate pledges which do not constitute real action. When the end goal of a movement is an idea or pledge, it is hard to then transition these hypotheticals into real, tangible solutions to environmental issues.
Diverse groups of people pushing and executing for concrete action is the most successful
The communities pushing back on AI data centers united people of all walks of life with the goal of not just asking companies or local governments to reconsider data center construction projects, but by taking legislative action, such as passing propositions and zoning laws, that legally halted the development of data centers in the area. This combination of a diverse group of people focused on concrete action is the best way to initiate successful environmental activism, and the AI data center pushback is far from the only example which has deployed this activism strategy. In the early 2010’s The Sierra Club, the subject of the unsuccessful case study, actually used this strategy in their incredibly successful Beyond Coal campaign, which brought together diverse stakeholders under one environmental issue (closing coal plants) with a tangible outcome (shutting down outdated coal plants and replacing them with renewable energy projects).
Overall, activism is a crucial component in the fight to solve global environmental problems, and it is imperative that activism strategies are optimized to enact as much positive environmental change as possible. By uniting diverse groups of people under common environmental goals with actionable solutions, people around the world can successfully advocate environmental crises and implement actions to positively impact the world.
Bibliography
Levy, Marc. “Big Tech’s Fast-Expanding Plans for Data Centers Are Running into Stiff Community Opposition.” AP News, AP News, 3 Jan. 2026, apnews.com/article/data-centers-artificial-intelligence-nimby-tech-21fa7b957664d5dca6788e35ab43b88e.
“Sierra Club’s Current Problems.” SANTA MONICA BAY AUDUBON SOCIETY BLOG, 19 Nov. 2025, smbasblog.com/2025/11/18/sierra-clubs-current-problems/.
Whyevolutionistrue. “Social Justice Wrecks the Sierra Club.” Why Evolution Is True, 14 Nov. 2025, whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/11/14/social-justice-wrecks-the-sierra-club/.
Wroth, Katharine. “Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the Ai Boom.” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 23 Feb. 2026, www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/.
