Tactical Adaptation and NGO-Ization: How the Coc Strategically Re-Established Its Place at the Center of Dutch LGBT Politics in the New Millennium

Throughout the 1980s the social movement organization (SMO) the COC was successful in getting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues onto the national political agenda and securing a position for itself in the development and implementation of Dutch government policy on LGBT issues. The 1990s, however, was a period of abeyance, in which the COC faced a difficult situation: its relationships with governmental actors were under pressure, its governmental funders were disappearing, and its central place in the LGBT social movement was challenged by another SMO.

Nonetheless, in the 2000s the COC came back stronger than it had ever been before, regaining its position as the most dominant SMO in the LGBT movement, helping to implement a new wave of LGBT policy coordinated among the national ministries of the government, and increasingly expanding its advocacy to rest of Europe and beyond with help from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of Dutch embassies.

In this paper insights are taken from the strategic interaction perspective and the political process approach to qualitatively explore three central questions around LGBT organizing in the Netherlands. First, based upon which strategy and through which tactics did the COC adapt in order to stage a successful comeback in the 2000s? Second, how were the COC’s strategy and adaptive tactics related to shifting relations with governmental actors? Third, in what ways did the COC’s strategy and adaptive tactics affect it organizationally and accelerate its NGO-ization?