Focusing Events, Public Attention, and Belief Conflict: The Impact of Climate Summits on National Policy Discourses

Climate change is one of societies’ biggest challenges, and this for some decades to come. To address it, the international community is willing to engage in global commitments and to establish international agreements. But how effective this global engagement is directly depends on domestic climate policy implementation. The purpose of this article is therefore to investigate the impact of international climate politics on domestic policymaking. More concretely, we analyze how vulnerable the national climate policy discourse is towards international negotiations. We assume that not only the mere event, but its respective success or failure impacts how the national policy discourse is shaped. We look at the Swiss climate policy discourse and study it through discourse network analysis and over more than one decade. We are able to investigate the impact of two successful international climate conferences, Bali (2007) and Paris (2015) and an unsuccessful event Copenhagen (2009) on the framing of the national discourse. We are particularly interested how much domestic media report about these international summits and how they are absorbed by national policymaking. We therefore systematically code statements of key actors about their preferred targets (e.g. CO2 emission reduction) and instruments (e.g. CO2 tax) to address (or not) the climate change challenge. Through advanced tools in rDNA and social network analysis, we are thereby able to map and measure cohesion, clustering and fragmentation in the domestic climate policy discourse after international summits. Results show that international enthusiasm has positive impact on ideological cohesion in the domestic discourse. International failure leads to more conflict, but gives room for more innovative instruments to address climate change effectively.