Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

The conditions under which policy beliefs and influential actors shape collaborative behaviour in governance networks are not well understood. This article applies exponential random graph models to network data from Finland and Sweden to investigate how beliefs, reputational power and the role of public authorities structure collaboration ties in the two countries’ climate change governance networks. Results show that only in Finland's conflictual climate policy domain do actors collaborate with those with similar beliefs and with reputational power, while only in Sweden's consensual climate policy domain do public authorities play central impartial coordinating roles. These results indicate that conflict is present in a governance network when beliefs and reputational power determine collaboration and that it is absent when public authorities occupy central roles. They also suggest that relative success in climate policy action is likely to occur when public authorities take on network manager roles.

Research has repeatedly shown that individuals and organisations tend to obtain information from others whose beliefs are similar to their own, forming “echo chambers” with their network ties. Echo chambers are potentially harmful for evidence-based policymaking as they can hinder policy learning and consensus building. Policy forums could help alleviate the effects of echo chambers if organisations with different views were to participate and to use the opportunities that forums provide to learn from those outside their networks. Applying exponential random graph models on survey data of the Irish climate change policy network, we find that policy actors do indeed tend to obtain policy advice from those whose beliefs are similar to their own. We also find that actors tend not to obtain policy advice from the those that they encounter at policy forums, suggesting forums are not enabling policy learning.

This paper investigates how anthropogenic climate change is presented to the Irish public by three of Ireland’s most important national newspapers. We argue that Irish newspapers do not report climate change in an objective and unbiased way and illustrate how through the acts of agenda setting, news framing and in how they construct public discourse they present the issue in a narrow ideological form. Evidence is provided to support the argument that ecological modernisation is used by Irish newspapers to construct the issue of climate change. Our study uses three levels of analysis: (1) we calculate the trend in the coverage of climate change between 1997 and 2012 to uncover what events are correlated with peaks in coverage; (2) we conduct an in-depth frame analysis of a large sample of articles to determine how the issue is classified and categorised; and (3) we conduct a discourse network analysis to uncover which actors are given a voice, which policy measures they favour and with whom they share policy positions. The data we find support our theoretical arguments, leading us to the conclusion that Irish newspapers produce and reproduce a narrow ideological worldview that is articulated, shared and propagated by Ireland’s political and economic elites.

Scientifically informed climate policymaking starts with the exchange of credible, salient, and legitimate scientific information between scientists and policymakers. It is therefore important to understand what explains the exchange of scientific information in national climate policymaking processes. This article applies exponential random graph models to network data from the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, and Portugal to investigate which types of organizations are favored sources of scientific information and whether actors obtain scientific information from those with similar beliefs as their own. Results show that scientific organizations are favored sources in all countries, while only in the Czech Republic do actors obtain scientific information from those with similar policy beliefs. These findings suggest that actors involved in climate policymaking mostly look to scientific organizations for information, but that in polarized contexts where there is a presence of influential denialists overcoming biased information exchange is a challenge.