The global climate debate and civil society

This paper looks at the public debate on climate change in five countries: India, Russia, Finland, France and the United States. We focus, in particular, on the role of civil society in media debates taking place during global climate summits. We use a method we call Public Justifications Analysis (PJA), based on the justification theory of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, to analyze the media debate around the UN COPs from 2007 to 2010. In addition to mapping the contents of the climate debate in different countries, using PJA to study the media-transmitted conflict over climate politics sheds light on the moral grounds of the debate. By examining the moral justifications that different actors give to their arguments on climate politics, we aim at understanding the similarities and differences in the ways in which the idea of climate justice is understood in different national contexts. These understandings, in turn, have implications on the attempts at forging global climate agreements. Through the comparison of debates in national media of these very different players of the international climate negotiations we bring forth central dimensions of the global climate debate, and analyze the globally oriented, yet in many ways locally and nationally bound grounds for argumentation that directs the debate.