Models of Change: The Climate Establishment’s Choices of Climate Policies

• In Event: Analyzing Debate and Discourse about Science and Environmental Issues

Abstract

International environmental non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are an integral component of the climate regime. This paper investigates the role of the climate establishment – which can be understood as insider INGOs who work within the multilateral process and with large corporations to influence rulemaking, soft law, and firm behavior. These highly resourced INGOs actively participate in the "Paris partnerships" – the voluntary cooperative efforts encouraged by the Paris Agreement. Since non-state actors are seen as a critical engine for decarbonization, it is important to understand how these prominent INGOs model change. That is, how does the climate establishment understand the mechanisms and processes that will lead to decarbonization? This paper investigates the climate establishment's models of change by examining the discourses they use and the policies they support through an analysis of their annual reports.

The paper employs text-as-data analysis to study the discourses and positions of eleven environmental INGOs in the climate establishment between 2000 and 2023. These INGOs are chosen for their links to Fortune 100 companies via shared memberships in various partnerships. The paper uses unsupervised structural topic modeling to examine the extent to which individual INGO supports either supply-side or demand-side climate policies. The former type of climate policy seeks to limit the supply of fossil fuels, while the latter aims to mitigate emissions by reducing demand.

Our research provides important insights into whether and how the climate establishment can help push for ambitious climate policies. The preliminary topic modeling results show that INGOs in the climate establishment, such as the Environmental Defense and the Nature Conservancy, are more likely to invoke demand-side solutions, such as energy efficiency or carbon pricing, than supply-side ones. Preliminary findings also indicate that some INGOs within the climate establishment support mobilizing climate movements as one avenue for change, consistent with research that civil society often uses both insider and outsider strategies to effect change.

Authors

• Jessica Green, University of Toronto

• Chen Zhong, University of Toronto