Opportunity,Context, and Action: Understanding the Divergent Strategies of Two Mexican Social Movement Coalitions in a Time of Tremendous Change

Evidence suggests collective action success is aided by organizations working in conjunction. Recent scholarship has refocused attention on what factors foster or impede coalition work. This article builds on the literature to show how the context in which coalitions emerge and act may be multiple and contradictory. Using data from extended field research, we examine two Mexican NGO coalitions to analyze how the intersection of national and local opportunity structures influenced their emergence and strategic action. We find that the impact of such influences may be contradictory. Democratization posed both threats and opportunities for the coalitions, providing impetus for their emergence, but limiting strategic choices as co-optation and neoliberalism undermined the opportunities created by democratization. We argue that the coalition members' interpretation of the local political context explains the divergent paths the two coalitions took over time.