International Organization Preferences for Climate Security: A Comparative Analysis of Expert Survey Data from 50 Organizations

Hunger, destruction of houses, spread of diseases, and violent conflict – societies worldwide are currently being confronted by pressing challenges for human and state security posed by climate change. Climate security challenges are complex and trans-boundary in nature and are thus debated by a large number of international organizations (IOs) such as the East African Community, European Union, United Nations Environment, World Bank, and World Health Organization. While there is a large literature on IO discourse, we know little about IOs’ ‘sincere’ preferences in tackling climate challenges. To what extent do IOs actually prefer addressing climate security challenges and how important are such challenges to IOs? In this paper, we identify almost 50 central IOs affected by climate security challenges and systematically measure and map their preferences and saliences across an array of about 15 issue areas in global governance such as health, development, and disaster risk management. Using expert survey data, this paper maps IO preferences for climate security issues and the salience of these issues in the IOs quantitatively, discussing the evidence thoroughly against the background of qualitative in-depth interviews with international policymakers in the UN system and existing case study literature on climate security. This analysis is grounded in a rational-institutionalist theoretical framework and bridge liberal International Relations theory and environmental social science. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how expert survey data can be collected and be used in environmental social science more broadly, to discuss the caveats associated with conventional measurement approaches, and to call attention to some of the pitfalls with expert survey data. So far, expert surveys have been widely used in political science to measure political party preferences but have not yet been applied in environmental social science. We conclude by broadening the theoretical focus to discuss how systematic expert survey measures of preferences could be used to push forward existing theory on fragmented and polycentric global environmental governance.