Values for Better Coalitions? Interest Groups’ Argumentation in Climate Policy-Making

The formal completion of the United States’ withdrawal from the The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 4 November 2020 marked an important turning point in global climate policy. This event led to changes in relations between key actors (eg. governments, international organizations) and to shifts in decision-making dynamics at the transnational level. Today, climate policy is shaped not only by national governments, but also by a wide range of non-state actors. These actors operate through international climate summits, forums, expert panels, and decision-making structures of the European Union. Against this background, this paper traces main argumentation used by key actors on view of the new climate policy setting after 2020. This research focuses on value-laden argumentation used to justify policy change and examines whether such arguments are employed instrumentally to enable coalition-building among interest groups. The study first identifies key transnational forums and decision-making centres where climate policy debates took place between 2020 and 2025, with a particular focus on the renewable energy and fossil fuel sectors, and then maps the main interest groups active in these arenas to follow their arguments, and coalitions’ relations. This paper addresses the questions of (1) which forums served as key sites of climate policy-making during the analysed period? (2) Which interest groups played a central role within them? (3) And how they contributed to transnational decision-making through coalition-building and the use of specific arguments. Methodologically, the study applies Bipartite Network Analysis to compare forums in terms of their capacity to bring together stakeholders, and Social Network Analysis to examine relations between interest groups, revealing coalition structures, central positions, and patterns of mediation within the network. It is expected that some interest groups strategically draw on shared values – such as corporate social responsibility, climate responsibility, to enter into or strengthen transnational coalitions.