Comparative and Global

The project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (Compon) investigates the reasons for cross-societal variation in the direction of emissions levels of carbon dioxide since 1990.  The project consists of research teams in 19 cases (countries or the region of Taiwan) plus a coordinating and integrating team that has been collecting data on this question since the project started in 2007.  The teams use identical research methods to allow for the most precise empirical comparisons.  Phase One consists of the content analysis of how the three major newspapers in a society cover and frame the issue of climate change.  Phase Two consists of a network survey conducted with the representatives of (50 to 100) organizations in state and society engaged with the climate change mitigation issue.  This paper and its associated case reports present findings from Phase One, the content analysis.  The cross-case analysis shows that between 1997 and 2010 the average global intensity of coverage of climate change rose steadily, while average coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rose and fell episodically with the reports.  The 17 individual cases varied around their global average trend line due to a number of factors.  Focusing on the years 2007-8, the cases showed dramatic variation in how they framed climate change, for example whether as an economic, scientific or other type of problem, and also in their major stances on how to respond to climate change.  Their response stances formed clusters that revealed the major fissures in global field of climate change discourse.