Climate Frames in International Organizations

As climate change-related risks for human livelihoods have become ever more pressing, the framings of those risks by international organizations (IOs) are becoming strikingly more diverse. Climate frames vary within and across issue areas, such as health, food, and security, with profound consequences for policy. This article asks why are some climate frames more likely to diffuse across IOs than others? The diffusion of climate frames is a complex process in which frame characteristics interact with motivations to drive diffusion. We break this theoretical complexity down into testable hypotheses that we explore by using a new dataset comprising information on the diffusion of climate frames in social media among eight IOs within the United Nations (UN) system from 2008 to 2019. This article demonstrates that characteristics of frames shape the likelihood of their diffusion across IOs. Namely, technical climate frames are more likely to diffuse among IOs, while emotional and emergency tonalities tend to undermine diffusion. Second, technical tonality appears to be most effective when IOs adopt frames through emulation, primarily since they may have limited knowledge about how climate risks matter in the context of their specific mandates.