Policy implications of climate change denial: Content analysis of Russian national and regional news media

Abstract

This article investigates the policy implications of national and regional climate change denial in Russia. While in general Russia has lagged behind in its climate mitigation policy, its key fossil-fuel regions are actively responding to external initiatives and pressures. As the country generally lacks substantial climate policy initiatives, the focus of this study is on the symbolic policy reactions operationalized as the media coverage of climate change at the national and regional levels in Russia during 2017–2018. Following the theoretical perspective of disproportionate policy response, the analysis elaborates on one of the suggested causes of policy over and underreactions, namely, the level of public demand for policy action. The findings indicate potential for disproportionate policy response research to conceive of public demand in broader terms, distinguishing between local, national and international domains.

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“…We conducted a comprehensive search via databases IS Web of Science, JSTOR and Scopus, using keywords 'climat* chang*' or 'global warming' and 'Russia' (including both English and Russian variations) and identified 127 sources that dealt in some way with climate scepticism. However, we found that only four were addressing climate change directly as the main topic of the paper (Poberezhskaya 2018a;Tynkkynen and Tynkkynen 2018;Yagodin 2021;Kokorin 2017). We therefore extended our search more widely, snowballing from papers already identified to find as much comment and context as possible.…”

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Network-Based Research on Organizational Resilience in Wuhan Thunder God Mountain Hospital Project during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Analysis of them can provide a comprehensive understanding of the overall situation and even lead to the discovery of the hidden story. Content analysis of news reports is one of the most systematic and objective methods for identifying relationships between covered objects or events in the surrounding environment, by which 100 papers were consulted to explore the influencing factors affecting safety in construction projects [79] and the media coverage of climate change at the national and regional levels in Russia during 2017-2018 was analyzed to identify the level of public demand for policy action [80]. Additional methods of research, such as questionnaires and interviews, have certain limitations in the context of this case.…”