Framing Climate Change in the EU and US After the Paris Agreement

Climate change is a complex policy challenge whose mitigation requires a common framework of ideas, assumptions and justifications among decision-makers and the political public to achieve policy progress. From this point of departure, the introduction develops the book’s central argument that the striking contrast between approaches to tackling climate change in the EU and US can be explained in significant part through differences in prevalent forms of discourse and their underlying ideas in both systems. How can the discursive advocacy of justificatory ideas on climate change and their contestation in both entities be linked to the divergence of their policy-making? In order to establish the foundation for this comparison, the chapter reviews the state of research and discusses economic, institutional and discursive variables as potential explanations for policy-making divergence. It concludes by explaining the dual rationale of the book of presenting the first comprehensive comparison of EU and US climate policy since the Paris Agreement, and to better understand how ideas and discourse matter for negotiating three challenges for policy-makers: namely, defining climate change as a problem for society, finding justifications for the evaluation of policies proposed for its mitigation and identifying agreed courses and frameworks of political action.

The chapter harnesses the concept of political space and the approach of framing analysis to develop the theoretical framework and hypotheses for the book. Based on the distinction of three major issue categories in debates about climate change related to questions of problem definition, policy evaluation and collective action, the chapter presents a typology of six main climate frames and their specification at different levels of political discourse as a framework for the empirical analysis. The chapter then specifies hypotheses about the structure of discourse, the linkages between frames and their contestation in the two contrasting cases of the EU and US to evaluate their respective debates on climate change. In its concluding part, the chapter outlines the body of policy documents selected for the empirical analysis and the method of dictionary-based automated coding, as well as the main indicators for the subsequent analysis of features of political discourse covered by the comparative hypotheses.

This chapter reviews the evolution of EU climate change policy and discourse from just before the conclusion of the Paris Agreement in 2015 to the recent proclamation of the European Green Deal and the adoption of a European climate law in July 2021. Adopting the heuristic of the policy cycle and distinction of different phases of EU energy and climate action, this reconstruction starts with a systematic survey of relevant European Council conclusions and EU Commission documents before zooming in on the adoption of resolutions and decision-making on relevant legislative frameworks by the European Parliament and its party group interaction. Based on this reconstruction, the second half of this chapter presents the main findings of the quantitative content analysis of policy documents and legislative texts included in the empirical analysis. Combining qualitative insights with data from this analysis, this chapter demonstrates the relevance of a framing centered on the idea of sustainable economic modernization, but also the emergence of a comprehensive, stable and relatively uncontested framing of climate action as a central policy project for the EU.

The chapter reviews the evolution of policies and controversy on climate change in the US since its inclusion in the Paris Agreement to the recent transition from the Trump to the Biden presidency. Adopting two key concepts to understand the context of policy-making—namely, the emergence of the administrative presidency and contested federalism—the chapter starts by discussing the Clean Power Plan and establishment of vehicle emission standards as a loose core of policies aiming at a reduction of carbon emissions. Shifting its focus from executive action to legislative debate, the case study then reviews the structure of agents and coalitions involved in controversy about climate policy proposals in both chambers of Congress. This survey includes proposals on the adherence to the Paris Agreement, carbon pricing, and more comprehensive programmatic resolutions on climate change such as the Green New Deal. Combining qualitative insights with the results of the quantitative content analysis, a key finding of the case study is the fragmentation of policy discourse advocating action against climate change, and the high degree of volatility of the policy debate resulting from changes in the presidency and political majorities in Congress.

This comparative chapter applies the threefold set of hypotheses presented in the theoretical part to the comparative quantitative content analysis of climate policy discourse in the EU and US. These hypotheses cover three aspects: First, the structure of discourse concerning the relative salience of different frames and their association with the issue categories of problem definition, policy evaluation and collective action; second, the density and scope of linkages between frames and resulting patterns of either comprehensive or selective forms of framing; and finally, political contestation resulting from paradigmatic emphasis on different forms of framing climate change, and from competing views for and against climate action that are promoted within the same respective frames. This comparative analysis reveals that similar structures of frames and issue categories are used in debates of the EU and US, but that their discourse on climate change differ particularly with regard to the selectiveness of forms of framing, and contestation between and within frames across institutional settings and between competing political agents. The overall assumption of a more volatile and fragmented political space of climate policy discourse therefore receives support from the data compared in the present analysis.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, particularly its argument that the fragmentation and contestation of political discourse about climate change, and differences in the political space as the framework of relevant issue dimensions are key factors for explaining the divergence of climate policy-making in the EU and US. Contextualizing these findings with current political developments and addressing future research agendas, the final part highlights two points: first, the relevance of issue linkages and processes of re-framing climate action in relation to other fields of policy-making, as observed in the launch of  programs for the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and from shifts in the debate on climate and energy policy resulting from the war in Ukraine; and second, the current dynamic of politicization of climate governance, understood as a term for the expansion of relevant public debate in terms of its scope, visibility and contentiousness. The chapter concludes by discussing how a research agenda focused on discourse and framing can contribute to our future understanding of these two key dynamics of controversy on climate change governance.