The media represents a discursive site with actors trying to influence the discourse on a particular subject. The paper delves into an exploratory analysis of the policy discourse around climate ch...

Why do some countries enact more ambitious climate change policies than others? Macro level economic and political structures, such as the economic weight of fossil fuel industries, play an important role in shaping these policies. So do the national science community and the national culture of science. But the process by which such macro-structural factors translate into political power and national climate change policies can be analyzed through focussing on meso level policy networks. The Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON) research project has studied climate change policy networks in twenty countries since 2007. Along with some findings, this paper presents some methodological challenges faced and the solutions developed in the course of the project. After a presentation of the project, we first outline some practical challenges related to conducting cross-national network surveys and solutions to overcome them, and present the solutions adopted during the project. We then turn to challenges related to causal explanation of the national policy differences, and propose Qualitative Comparative Analysis as one solution for combining different levels of analysis (macro and meso) and different data types (quantitative, network and qualitative).

Culture has become a prominent concept in social movement research. It is, however, often employed in an unsystematic and limited way. This volume introduces and compares different concepts of culture in social movement research. It assesses advantages and shortcomings of existing concepts and introduces new approaches. In particular, it addresses facets of cultural theory that have hitherto been largely neglected in the literature on social movements. This includes ideas from anthropology, discourse analysis, sociology of emotions, narration, spatial theory, and others. The chapters in this volume address three relationships between social movements and culture: culture as a framework for movements, social movements' internal culture, and culture and cultural change as a result of social movement activity. For the purpose of making concepts easily accessible, each contribution explains its approach to culture in an understandable way and illustrates it with recent cases of mobilization. Theorizing culture from different perspectives beyond the mainstream. Feeling -- Thinking : emotions as central to culture -- 'A whole way of struggle?' Western Marxisms, social movements and culture -- Reassessing the culture concept in the analysis of global social movements : an anthropological perspective -- Culture as a framework for movement activity. Culture and activism across borders -- Comparing discourse between cultures : a discursive approach to movement knowledge -- Culture and movement strength from a quantitative perspective : a partial theory -- Internal movement culture. Movement space : a cultural approach -- Movement culture as habit(us) : resistance to change in the routinized practices.

National climate policies are shaped by international organizations (IOs) and global norms. Drawing from World Society Theory and the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), we develop two related arguments: (1) one way in which IOs can influence national climate policy is through their engagement in mass-mediated national policy debates and (2) national organizations involved in the policy process may form advocacy coalitions to support or oppose the norms promoted by IOs. To examine the role of IOs in national policy debates and the coalitions that support and oppose them, we use discourse network analysis (DNA) on over 3500 statements in 11 newspapers in Canada, the United States (US), Brazil, and India. We find that in the high-income countries that are high per capita emitters (Canada and the US), IOs are less central in the policy debates and the discourse network is strongly clustered into competing advocacy coalitions. In the lower-income countries that are low per capita emitters (Brazil and India), IOs are more central and the discourse network is less clustered. Relating these findings to earlier research, we suggest that the differences we find between high and low per capita emitters may be to some extent generalizable to the relevant country groups beyond our four cases.