Climate Change Litigation Networks in the U.S.: Comparing Pro and Anti-Regulatory Coalitions Around Federally Mandated GHG Emissions Standards

Policy scholars have rigorously studied the behavior of stakeholders seeking to influence how government agencies design and implement rules, yet evidence of how stakeholders partake in coalitions across different rulemaking processes is generally lacking. Coalition activity can be one of the most important signals of potential support -or opposition-to rules that policy makers and bureaucracies design and allows stakeholders to pursue strategic goals at reduced costs, shape public debate by influencing a broader platform, gather information, and receive symbolic benefits. In the United States, the development of environmental regulations (or lack thereof) is partially explained by the existence of two opposing factions with radically divergent agendas regarding the need for stronger regulations. Here, we build on previous research examining stakeholder interactions around regulatory responses to climate change in the United States to examine how stakeholders self-organize into coalitions during the litigation process challenging the three most important rules developed during the Obama administration to tackle climate change: 1) the VOC and Methane Standards for Oil and Gas Facilities; 2) the Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, 3) and the Clean Power Plan. To recreate and compare these coalitions in dispute, we utilize data from court dockets for cases challenging each rule. We extract information contained in the dockets to create bipartite networks of stakeholders’ participation in court cases via jointly filing documents to the courts. Our database consists of 488 actors participating across seven different federal cases. We use baseline models and community detection routines to examine and compare a) the distribution of open vs closed subnetwork structures, b) the prevalence of stakeholders participating across regulations, and c) the composition and structure of subcoalitions. We analyze differences at the nodal and coalitional level; and discuss the implications of the differences between pro and anti-climate change coalitions in the increasingly important arena of litigation over environmental regulations in the United States.