The Diffusion of Climate Change Norms Across Sectors and Scales

The failure to adapt to climate change is among the world’s greatest policy challenges. Having traditionally been viewed as local and technical phenomena, “slow harms” such as air and water contamination, but also climate-related harms with shorter time horizons such as epidemics and extreme weather events, are increasingly being contested across policy sectors and scales. This paper develops a new theoretical framework to understand why climate norms diffuse through organizations across policy sectors, such as health, development, disaster risks, food, migration, and water, and across local, national, and international scales. Examples for fiercely debated climate norms are climate-conflict, climate-disaster, climate-health, and climate-induced migration, for which different solutions are discussed: climate mitigation (measures to diminish greenhouse gas emissions) and climate adaptation (measures of human adjustment to climate stimuli). Empirically, we trace and explain the patterns of climate norms diffusion through organizations over the past fifteen years across sectors and scales. Using modern web- and social media-scraping techniques, we obtain textual data that accounts for official communication of a number of international organizations (from their official webpages and social media accounts) from 2006 to 2019. To analyze the data, we combine text analysis and other quantitative methods. In all, the paper advances theories of norms diffusion and adds knowledge on the normative dynamics of environmentalism.