COMPON

Despite the Kyoto Protocol, only a few nations have taken even initial steps toward the mitigation of climate change (reduction in GHG outputs and protection of sinks). Nations have sufficient natural scientific information on the subject, but lack the social and political will to respond seriously, thus hindering global efforts to address this problem.

The project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON) is examining the causes of this inertia by studying the factors that account for cross-national variation in efforts to mitigate climate change. This variation arises from difference in the interaction process between ways of thinking (discourse) and ways of acting (coalitions) in national cases. The COMPON project currently has teams in over 15 societies (developed, developing, and transitional) and at the international level collecting equivalent empirical data on these processes using content analysis, interview, and inter-organizational network survey.

We collect data at the level of the organizational field from the full range of domestic and international organizations affecting the national CC policy making or social influence processes. Network data permits a more fine-grained and systematic testing of hypotheses about the social factors that affect the national CC response and decision-making processes. The most important factor concerns the acceptance and action framing of IPCC-type scientific CC evidence and projections. The second factor concerns the social and political empowerment of those frames. Our hypotheses (stated in network-testable terms) include: 1) the presence of venues for egalitarian stakeholder participation will increase the diffusion of IPCC-type scientific information and increase its empowerment; 2) the empowerment of contrarian views will depend upon the number and network centrality of fossil-fuel dependent interest groups; 3) the greater the network centrality of climate science actors in national information, negotiation and trust networks, the stronger the national mitigation response; 4) the higher the cultural legitimacy of domestic climate science actors, the stronger the national mitigation response.

The COMPON project has received substantial funding from the US National Science Foundation and governmental sources in other countries. It is intended to advance the social theory of climate change response, to provide a public data base for research on a continuing basis, to establish research and teaching centers on this theme, and to suggest principles for the design of more effective international climate change treaties. We invite new researchers to collaborate with the COMPON project either by bringing in a new country case (a good project for a PhD thesis) or by adding some expertise. Please contact the project PI Jeffrey Broadbent, at jeff@compon.org.