In December 2009, the UN Climate Change Conference was held in Copenhagen. While the official summit involved meetings and seminars with politicians, scientists and established NGOs, it also prompted extraordinary protest activities, both in Copenhagen and elsewhere in the World. In this paper we analyse surveys of three large climate demonstrations in Copenhagen, Brussels and London with a focus on how demonstrators frame the climate problem, who is responsible, and preferred solutions. The demonstrations are results of the mobilization of broad coalitions of groups, and we find significant variation in the demonstrators’ framings in terms of (1) a tension between system-critical and more individualist approaches, (2) the scale of the solutions, and (3) frame-bridging with socialist and justice frames. Variation between countries is explored, and explanations are sought in terms of differences in organizational and individual composition of the demonstrations, as well as the specific mobilizing contexts. We discuss the extent to which the characteristics of the climate demonstrations reflect the current state of the climate movement, at the grassroots level. The between-country comparison is made possible by a unified methodology for sampling participants in demonstrations and controlling for response bias.
