Inside and outside the climate negotiations: Contrasting networks of conference diplomacy reporting and media perception

Abstract: The negotiations around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are the main forum in which global agreements on climate change are debated. However, due to the slow pace of this multilateral process, and to growing recognition of the complexity of the challenge, climate change has begun to be addressed across multiple channels outside the negotiations. In addition, the press plays a key role in reporting on climate-related political events and thus portraying them to the broader public, possibly also influencing the political process itself. So far, there is scant research into the similarities, differences and interrelationships between the UNFCCC negotiations and how climate diplomacy is portrayed by the media. This study takes a first systematical step in this direction, relying on two novel datasets. The first one records agreements and disagreements between country dyads at the UNFCCC negotiations, hand-coded from summaries of the negotiations published between 1995 and 2013 in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin. The second one is based on automated text coding of press releases, and contains information on cooperative and conflictive climate-related diplomatic interactions between country dyads between 1995 and 2015. We use a combination of descriptive statistics and dynamic social network analysis to investigate the data.

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