Not seeing eye to eye: challenges to building ethnically and economically diverse environmental coalitions

Environmental issues are collective action problems that can only be solved with coordinated efforts among diverse groups of people. Whether people are willing to collaborate to solve these problems, however, depends on their perceptions of, and trust in, each other. If people misperceive each other—for instance, due to inaccurate beliefs about who truly cares about environmental issues—then it becomes difficult to build diverse coalitions to address these collective problems. In this paper we review recent research on factors that lead diverse groups of people to misperceive each other’s environmental concerns, and the consequences of these misperceptions for collective action. We then conclude by discussing a more inclusive approach for building diverse coalitions in environmental movements.