Constructions of Climate Justice in German, Indian and US Media Debates

Constructions of Climate Justice in German, Indian and US Media Debates

Methodological Documentation

1Country sample

Germany, India and the US were selected as countries cases. They are major players in international climate politics and responsible for 26% of global CO2 emissions (Rank 2, 3 and 6 of the world's countries by 2010 total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, cf. Boden et al. 2013). Moreover, they are established democracies with a free press, enabling open debates about climate governance (Freedom House 2011). As important representatives of the negotiation blocs EU, G77/BASIC and Umbrella within the UNFCCC process they are known to hold diverging interests (cf. Cass 2006; Weidner 2007; Kasa et al. 2008; Selin and VanDeveer 2011; Bidwai 2012; Audet 2013), enabling me to reconstruct a potentially diverse set of normative climate justice constructions.

2Mass media sample

I chose leading print media for analysis, i.e. media with a “guiding societal function” (Wilke 1999) based, for example, on their circulation, reputation or quality. Print media were selected since they offer a simpler means of collecting and analyzing data (cf. e.g. Doulton and Brown 2009). As previous studies have shown significant differences between media of different political orientation (e.g. Carvalho and Burgess 2005; Höppner 2010; Feldman et al. 2012; Painter and Ashe 2012; Pasquaré and Oppizzi 2012), I included two to three newspapers for each country representing the political spectrum (see Table 1).

Table 1: Newspapers included in the study

Selection and classification based on Hans-Bredow-Institut (2009); IfM (2010); Eilders (2002); Kleinsteuber and Thomaß (2008); Hediger (2007); Groseclose and Milyo (2005); Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010)

The analyzed articles stem from the project Global Media Map on Climate Change (see Schäfer et al. 2012a; Schmidt et al. 2013), with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, for which an equivalent sampling procedure was followed. To gather the relevant climate change coverage, a complex search string was employed for full-text searches in electronic databases. This was followed by elaborated automatic and manual checks for duplicates and articles not mentioning climate change in our sense (for a detailed documentation of the data collection procedure, see Schäfer et al. 2012b).

The article sample for the present project was limited by excluding articles not discussing societal reactions to climate change.However, different types of articles were included, provided that they included evaluative statements on climate governance by the author of the piece (most of the time a journalist) or by cited actors. Compared to an exclusive focus on opinion pieces this allowed for a broader representation of the mediated climate change discussion. While not every single article was itself debate-oriented, also claims in news oriented pieces can be considered to belong to the broader debate about the issue.

3Period of investigation

The period of investigation was limited to certain time frames between 2007 and 2010. The time period from 2007 to 2010 is characterized by major climate change negotiations on the international level as well as by many domestic legislative actions (Gupta 2010: 646ff, Townshend et al. 2011).Correspondingly, public attention for climate change was very high(Grundmann and Krishnamurthy 2010; Jogesh 2012; Broadbent 2013; Schmidt et al. 2013; Hart and Feldman 2014). Several other studies have chosen similar time periods for similar reasons(Hoffman 2011; Never 2011).

As media cover certain topics mostly due to events (Kriesi 2001; Waldherr 2012), also in the case of climate change (Schäfer et al. 2014), I focus onseveral major climate political occasions. In comparison to a random selection across the whole period this also allows for a better understanding of the discussion dynamics concerning concrete political initiatives. In particular, the annual UN climate change conferences are of great importance many actors direct their climate political activities to this period and the media attention is especially high (Benford 2010; Schmidt et al. 2013). The conferences of 2007 and 2009 received the most attention between 1996 and 2010. Additionally, for each country I have identified two important national climate governance approaches (based on Townshend et al. 2011) and subsequently determined the respective time frames of governmental and/or parliamentary debate and passage.

International: Bali Climate Change Conference, 26/11-22/12/2007; Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, 30/11 – 25/12/2009

Germany: Integrated Energy and Climate Program, 20-31/12/2007 and 3-25/6/2008; EU Climate Package, 16-30/1/2008 and 4-24/12/20080F[1]

India: National Action Plan on Climate Change, 27/6-7/7/2008 and 10-22/12/2008; Climate Strategy “Taking on Climate Change Post Copenhagen Domestic Actions”, 15/6-7/7/2010

USA: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 23/1-24/2/2009; American Clean Energy and Security Act, 23/6-3/7/2009 and 1-31/7/2010

The Wall Street Journal sample is restricted to the 2009 climate change conference and the 2009-2010 national legislation periods.

4List of analyzed articles

All listed articles have been coded on the article level and include utterances (de-)problematizing climate change and/or evaluating climate governance (options). Additionally, all bold articles have been intensively coded on the actor statement level – this coding strategy was used to analyze climate governance evaluations in-depth. A total of 600 articles (out of 1,593 categorized on the article level) and 1,810 actor statements have been coded intensively and interpreted in-depth.

4.1Germany

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Total: 312 articles, of which 168were coded intensively(604 actor statements).