The enduring importance of evidence, coalition-building and strategic engagement
SuRebuilding effective advocacy through evidence, broad coalitions and a renewed commitment to democratic engagement.btitle
By Neil Pharaoh
There are two dynamics operating internally within for-purpose spaces that need to be explored and evaluated and they are identity absolutism and an over-reliance on lived experience.
While identity and lived experience clearly play a role in comprehensive policy development, treating them as substitutes for evidence, coalition-building and strategic engagement is a dangerous path to walk.
While often well-intentioned, these tendencies can unintentionally narrow appeal, harden opposition and invite backlash, including from far-right actors and media ecosystems primed to exploit division.
The risk is not only policy failure, but political reaction. If civil society does not adapt its methods, it may unwittingly help create the conditions for a domestic version of the populist backlash seen elsewhere. Understanding this tension is essential if advocacy is to remain both effective and legitimate in a volatile democratic environment.
A hard truth for the social purpose sector is that the contemporary fixation on intersectionality — as it is now practised rather than originally conceived — is actively fragmenting collaboration and weakening reform coalitions. What began as a framework to understand overlapping disadvantage has evolved into a hyper-individualised sorting mechanism, dividing people into ever-narrower identity categories and too often positioning potential allies as threats rather than partners.
The consequence is not greater justice, but weaker collective action. Research across political psychology and social movement theory consistently shows that movements fracture when internal boundary-policing overtakes shared purpose.
Over time, capable and pragmatic reformers disengage — not because they reject progressive goals, but because the space becomes hostile to coalition-building, compromise and institutional engagement.
This fragmentation has not occurred in a vacuum. The far right identified early that progressive movements could be neutralised not by defeating their objectives, but by encouraging internal division. Disinformation research and political strategy analysis show how identity-based frameworks were caricatured, amplified and weaponised to split progressive movements into competing moral camps. Rather than resisting this tactic, much of the progressive space absorbed it wholesale.
The result has been a slow-motion unravelling of broad coalitions in favour of internal hierarchies of legitimacy that reward ideological purity over real-world impact. In effect, a movement oriented toward systemic reform walked into a trap designed to make it smaller, louder and less effective.
There is also an uncomfortable ideological contradiction at play. The modern application of intersectionality increasingly reflects an intensely individualistic worldview — one that sits closer to neoliberal philosophy than to collective social democracy.
By centring politics on personal identity, positionality and subjective experience, it mirrors the same atomisation that market liberalism applies to economics.
Shared material conditions, universal public goods and collective interests are pushed to the margins.
This is not accidental. A fragmented society arguing over identity categories is far easier to govern, ignore or divide than one organised around common interests, fairness and shared accountability.
The cost of this shift is now visible across the not-for-profit and advocacy sector. Collaboration is harder. Trust is thinner. Advocacy becomes performative rather than strategic.
Most concerningly, movements lose the ability to speak to the broad middle of society: the constituency required to move policy and rebuild trust in democratic institutions.
A growing body of critique — particularly from within the political left itself — warns that the elevation of “lived experience” as a primary source of truth is intellectually incoherent and democratically corrosive.
One of the clearest voices is feminist historian Joan W. Scott, whose work sits squarely within progressive and post-structuralist traditions.
In The Evidence of Experience, Scott argues that experience is not self-evident or self-authenticating. It is mediated by language, power and interpretation, and therefore requires analysis, comparison and challenge. Treating individual perception as conclusive evidence, she argues, abandons the very critical tools that feminism and progressive politics fought to develop.
This critique is echoed across centre-left policy and public health scholarship, where the misuse of anecdote has long been recognised as a threat to sound decision-making. Personal stories are rhetorically powerful, but methodologically weak when detached from population-level data. The issue is not whether lived experience matters — it does — but how it is used. Experience must inform inquiry, not terminate it.
Elevating a single account above rigorous evidence does not advance justice or equity. It undermines reform by replacing explanation with assertion, and persuasion with moral immunity.
What is striking is that this shift represents not progress, but regression. Prior to the development of scientific method, medicine, law and governance relied heavily on authority, testimony and belief. One person’s account — particularly if socially sanctioned — could be treated as definitive truth. The scientific revolution emerged precisely to counter this, through comparison, falsifiability and replication.
To recentre individual perception as the ultimate arbiter of truth is not enlightenment; it is a retreat from the foundations of modern knowledge. When blind studies involving thousands of participants are dismissed because one account “feels different”, reason gives way to relativism. Without a shared basis for fact, democratic disagreement becomes irresolvable.
The democratic consequences are profound. Shared facts are the currency of pluralist societies like Australia. Without them, persuasion collapses and disagreement harden into identity-based certainty. The echo chambers of social media are not an aberration – when you have a political process which values experience over evidence, the “entitlement” to have an opinion, even if wrong or factually incorrect is reflected and accelerated online. The echo chambers online are the consequence of algorithms accelerating this.
Progressive politics, which depends on coalition-building and majority consent, cannot function in an environment where claims are insulated from scrutiny by identity or experience alone. The irony is acute: a concept intended to broaden understanding has become a mechanism that fragments discourse and shuts it down.
This doesn’t mean compassion or empathy should be abandoned. It is to reclaim a progressive commitment to evidence, reason and contestable truth. Without those foundations, democratic argument is replaced by competing certainties — and trust in institutions continues to erode.
This article was written as part of the development of Tanck's 2026 whitepaper together with Perpetual Wealth.
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