Global Climate – Fragmented Knowledge. Explaining Cross-national Variation in Causal beliefs on Climate Change

Many governance challenges in environmental politics involve some scientific uncertainty. As climate change represents such an issue, the causal beliefs on its problem properties differ across different constituencies and points of time: while US-American politicians thought of climate change as hardly harmful until the early 2000s, German and British politicians were much earlier aware of the dangers involved in climate change. This paper investigates the conditions that cause cross-national variation in causal beliefs towards climate change. In doing so, it proposes a theoretical model that is based on the Epistemic Community framework but integrates the resonance hypothesis from norm diffusion research and the regulatory capture model from International Political Economy in order to enrich the model’s theoretical depth and empirical soundness. The theoretical model is supported by a quantitative cross-national analysis on causal beliefs about climate change.