Necessities shaping the advocacy actors from different backgrounds to form a coalition: Examining the interaction of anti-liquor groups in Tamil Nadu

This study focuses on the different advocacy actors in Tamil Nadu who seek to influence the government for complete alcohol ban in the state through advocating actions like anti-liquor protests, filing cases, expressing their views in public speeches, legislative assemblies, interviews, etc. Those advocacy actors include women groups, social activists, and political members. Though these actors are socially, politically, and gender-wise diverse, they come together, collaborate, and coordinate in advocacy actions against alcohol sale. This study tries to unveil why should they collaborate for one common policy objective of prohibiting alcohol despite of their differences. There are various cases where actors within a policy subsystem with shared beliefs collaborate for a policy change, but this is unique as they are naturally different and present their problems in different ways but come together in a coalition for a common policy objective. This provides a different dimension on how society, politics, and policy operate. To reveal it, the main questions asked in the research are how different advocacy actors present their views about their positionality on alcohol sale and what are the necessities for these different actors to collaborate in a coalition through coordinated advocating strategies. These questions are addressed qualitatively by collecting the data from the advocacy actors and by analysing the advocating events against alcohol sale in Tamil Nadu. The analysis of these collected data through Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) reveals that the shared opponent (TASAMC), common interest (of banning alcohol for the wellbeing), and the necessities or the dependence of each actor on the other actor(s) made them to collaborate and coordinate together, so that they can have multiple wins on their advocating attempts against alcohol sale. The study encourages for the similar research to study on the similar widespread cases around the world to understand how interaction and coalition of different advocacy actors work in various contexts.