November 3, 2026
The following is a blog post by Yu Kang, a former Goldman Prize intern and graduate of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
Earlier this year, as my master’s degree capstone project, I got access to something rare: the Goldman Environmental Prize’s full archive of winners and finalists since the Prize’s founding.
Since 1990, the Goldman Prize has recognized 239 winners from 98 countries and systematically documented more than 1,000 finalist cases. Each year, the Prize jury selects six winners from a substantive and intensely researched docket of roughly 30 finalists—30 people whose work represents the best of grassroots environmental activism.
My task was to find the patterns and wisdom hiding inside that archive, and then answer one central question: Which strategies actually worked? I wanted to pull out lessons that environmental activists and movements could use today—not abstract theory, but real-world patterns demonstrated by people who achieved excellence.
My first step was to familiarize myself with the data. I studied the tactics, adversaries, and political environments documented across three decades of winner and finalist cases. Using records from 1993 to 2026, I focused on 883 cases.
My Process: Decoding a Rich History of Environmental Victories
Next, I needed to establish a framework. I mapped each case study across four different dimensions:
- Political environment (democratic, transitional, authoritarian)
- Primary adversary (government, corporation, or state-corporate alliance)
- Community dependence on the threatened resource (high, moderate, low)
- Movement stage (early/emerging, escalating, victory, post-victory)
These dimensions allowed me to group similar cases together and identify which strategic directions were most closely associated with success.
Identifying Common Campaign Strategies
Next, I looked at the strategies themselves. Across the 883 cases, I identified 12 “strategic genes”—core tactics that the campaigns used in different combinations—and I mapped how often each “gene” was used in each campaign. The findings were revealing:
- Community organizing (self-explanatory) ➜ present in 100% of cases
- Strategic litigation (formal litigation, court injunction, or enforcement orders) ➜ 84%
- Scientific evidence (independent data collection, testing, or epidemiological research) ➜ 79%
- Policy reform (legislative, regulatory, or institutional reform) ➜ 70%
- Health justice (using data on disease rates or toxicology) ➜ 65%
- Transnational accountability (actions filed in a foreign court or through an international mechanism) ➜ 65%
- Exposing corruption (used when information is actively concealed) ➜ 42%
- Community conservation (if a community holds substantive veto authority over a defined area) ➜ 37%
- Direct action (physical blockade, occupation, or bodily obstruction) ➜ 32%
- Indigenous sovereignty (using free, prior, and informed consent or Indigenous rights as core legal argument) ➜ 19%
- Financial leverage (divestment pressure applied to funders, insurers, or supply-chain partners) ➜ 12%
- Alternative economy (providing a more sustainable economic path) ➜ 4%
As I expected, the basis of grassroots environmentalism—community organizing—shows up in every single case. Strategic litigation and scientific evidence also appear in the vast majority of cases. Other strategies, like financial leverage and alternative economy, are much rarer but still matter.
Ultimately, the winning campaigns tend to combine several strategies, and the mix changes depending on the political environment, the adversary, and how much the community depends on the resources at stake.
A Picture Emerges of a Changing Environmental Landscape
The numbers tell me more than first meets the eye. The headline percentages show what features winning campaigns share, but when I overlaid strategies used over time, the shifts beneath them demonstrated how environmental movements are changing.
Two trends stand out in recent years: First, transnational accountability as a tool is decreasing, and second, the focus on Indigenous sovereignty and community conservation is increasing.
Is this the result of a shrinking international space? Or does it reflect something deeper—that locally grounded strategies, amplified by digital tools and social media, now carry more leverage than before? Maybe it’s testimony to a new kind of power, built from community organizing, growing grassroots networks, and an ascendant global environmental movement.
For activists, an important question is how to operate inside this shifting power architecture. Those who tune in closely to a community’s internal dynamics—its emotional and material realities—may be better able to sustain long-term environmental work…and win.
There are many other useful trends and lessons to be found within the full report (access the entire document here*). The archive is now being studied, and its lessons are starting to surface: distilled, searchable, and ready to use.
*Note: The categories and strategies identified in the report are based on the careful analysis by the author and not vetted by Prize winners or finalists themselves. Names of some finalists have been redacted in the document for privacy.
Acknowledgements:
This research would not have been possible without the generosity of many. I am grateful to Professor Hector E. Cárdenas Suárez at UC Berkeley for his insightful scholarly guidance, and to the Goldman Environmental Prize team for strengthening this work.
About the author
Yu Kang
Yu Kang is a former intern at the Goldman Environmental Prize. She holds a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Renmin University of China.
Prior to attending Berkeley, she founded China’s first poetry education nonprofit, which has reached over 230,000 rural children since 2016. She also serves as a Board Member of Renmin University of China.
