Work on coalitions between civil society organizations working together at EU level has found that these factors matter but that collaboration is most often episodic and highly strategic and that external threats are often the catalyst for cooperation.
However, transnational and trans-issue civil society coalitions such as the European Social Platform offer some evidence that diverse civil society organizations can work collaboratively over time to promote learning and knowledge transfer and grow a
a form of social movement organizational community. Using the case study of the Social Platform this paper examines the dynamics of coalition across the civil society sector working on equality and social justice issues at EU level. Interview data and document analysis is employed to assess the role of both internal coalition based factors and the external political context in coalition survival. Cooperation is facilitated by dense social ties, external threats posed by financial and political restrictions and the use of transversal frames that define social rights as fundamental rights, violence as discriminatory and care as an economic issue. These factors have generated thin but flexible forms of cooperation but they may be insufficient either to sustain the coalition and or enable them to shape EU social and equality policy in the unprecedented and increasing hostile political opportunity context of EU austerity.
