Frame alignment and environmental advocacy: the influence of NGO strategies on policy outcomes in China

ABSTRACT

The link between environmental frames and policy outcomes in China is explored. Environmental nongovernment organizations’ (ENGOs) issue interpretation and presentation affect environmental policy changes. The notion of ‘frame alignment’ is introduced, and it is argued that it can serve to link ENGOs’ advocacy needs and frame resonance among different stakeholders, thus successfully promoting advocacy. Based on in-depth interviews and analysis of news reports over a span of 10 years, it is found that where ENGOs are able to align their issue frames with those of the central state and media, the resulting frame resonance smooths policy change. In contrast, where ENGOs adopt conflict frames critical of state authorities, the absence of alignment leads to a slim chance of policy change. The findings shed light on why some ENGOs successfully create linkage and achieve their desired outcomes while others fail to do so.     

Does climate denialism still matter? The prevalence of alternative frames in opposition to climate policy

Issue frames portraying climate science as uncertain are cited as a key impediment to new climate change and energy policies. However, some have recently argued that the debate over policy impacts, especially policy impacts on consumers, has become more politically salient than the debate over science. This study applies qualitative content analysis to 340 documents from the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, to test whether certain policy frames have become more common among leading opponents of climate policy in the United States. The results indicate a continued reliance on science framing, with more directed attacks on climate scientists and fewer frames stressing the uncertainty of climate science. An increase in the use of policy frames related to effects on consumers also suggests that opposition to climate policy is taking new forms as the political debate evolves, with ramifications for climate change policy opposition on an international scale.     

Hannah Arendt’s turn to the self and environmental responses to climate change paralysis

Environmentalists have struggled with how to mobilize people to act in the face of widespread and now inevitable consequences of climate change. Significant responses to this challenge, such as incentivizing individual Green choices in the market and avoiding the rhetoric of catastrophe, continue the philosophical and political trends, identified by Hannah Arendt, that contribute to world alienation and the decline of politics. Environmental thinkers are invited to use Arendt’s theories of the turn to the self and political action to think critically about contemporary strategies to address climate change.     

A pipeline of tweets: environmental movements’ use of Twitter in response to the Keystone XL pipeline

Social movements often amalgamate otherwise diffuse public political interests. In recent years, social media use has allowed both groups and individuals to engage with political issues both online and offline. How do organizations use Twitter to mobilize networked publics? To what extent do groups promote both ‘connective action’ online and traditional activism offline? How do their strategies differ according to whether they seek to promote or combat the status quo? And how do they balance encouraging and reinforcing individualized expression through group messaging? The ways pro-Keystone XL pipeline and anti-Keystone XL groups differed in their Keystone-related action on Twitter from January 2010 until October 2014 are analyzed. Boolean searching and Natural Language processing are used to analyze more than three million tweets. The results demonstrate that the frames within Twitter conversations have significant implications for how communities understand, develop, and mobilize around environmental issues.     

New subjects in the politics of energy transition? Reactivating the northern German oil and gas infrastructure

The global circulation of the word ‘fracking’ seems to testify to a setback for energy transitions, a nexus that has not yet received much scholarly attention. In light of this, the controversy over fracking is understood as furthering infrastructural changes that are central to energy transitions. Infrastructure should not be understood as materiality per se but instead as sedimented but ultimately discursive elements that can be reactivated and rearticulated. Examining ‘infrastructure’ from the point of view of discourse theory places the focus on infrastructural change. Prior to 2011, the oil and gas infrastructure in northern Germany was largely invisible to the public. The subsequent reassembling of production with fracking facilitated the politicization not just of that term but also of the whole infrastructure. Instead of routinely reproducing the infrastructure, subjects that had formerly dominated the field were confronted with new and heterogeneous voices that challenged their agency.     

Elite cues,media coverage,and public concern: an integrated path analysis of public opinion on climate change, 2001–2013

To analyze the factors affecting US public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2013, data from 74 separate surveys are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. Five factors should account for changes in levels of concern: extreme weather events, public access to accurate scientific information, media coverage, elite cues, and movement/countermovement advocacy. Structural equation modeling indicates that elite cues, movement advocacy efforts, weather, and structural economic factors influence the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, it is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Promulgation to the public of scientific information on climate change has no effect. Information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern.