The Impact of Climate Summits on National Policymaking – A Longitudinal Discourse Analysis of Swiss Climate Policy

The purpose of this article is to investigate how vulnerable the national climate policy discourse is towards international negotiations, and their respective success and failure. We take the Swiss climate policy discourse and study it over two decades. We are thereby able to investigate the impact of two successful international climate conferences, Kyoto (1997) and Bali (2007) and an unsuccessful event Copenhagen (2009) on the framing of the national discourse. We are particularly interested in the policy targets (e.g. CO2 emission reductions) and policy instruments (e.g., CO2 tax, voluntary measured) that are preferred by key actors of the national climate policy and reported by media. We expect that while the summits in 1997 and 2007 increased the climate protection enthusiasm at national scale, the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 reduced this “climate enthusiasm”. As a result, less effective policies to address climate change were discussed in the discourse. To investigate the discourse we rely on the Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) and systematically attribute policy preferences and climate-relevant statements to key actors in the policy discourse.