Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON)
(PI: Jeffrey Broadbent, University of Minnesota)
For all the brilliant natural science research on climate change ringing alarm bells, in its practical response, humanity is still asleep at the wheel. World output of greenhouse gasses continues to rise at a precipitous rate. Some nations, ratifers of the Kyoto Protocol, have reined in their output a little. China is slated to overtake the U.S. as top global emitter by 2009. The resulting climate change will bring intensifying disaster for humanity. Al Gore calls this a “planetary crisis.” Greatly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, not to speak of attaining a “sustainable society” with no net emissions, will require the radical global transformation of industrial civilization. To attain this goal, humanity will have to learn to cooperate like never before. Crisis brings opportunity. Social scientists can contribute to this transition by helping humanity understand how we have responded to this crisis, and how to respond better.
In the process of conducting extended field work on environmental politics and movements in Japan (Broadbent 1998) and later collecting and comparing policy network survey data (Knoke et al. 1996), I became increasing fascinated with networks; the policy network perspective (Laumann and Knoke 1987; Raab and Kenis 2007) and the relational view of power and social processes. Accordingly, colleagues and I are designing the Comparative Climate Change Policy Network (Compon) project from that perspective.
We can only know about climate change through science. The Compon project will compare a range of nations on how they take in and use scientific information about global climate change form a common global source, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).* To be effective, issue framings, including science, must be carried by “advocacy networks,” which increasingly include global actors (Social Learning Group 2001:187-95). The U.N. Agenda 21 advocates “stakeholder participation” as a way of building such advocacy networks. However, theories of network governance raise questions about the relationship between networks, governance and democratic representation, noting possibilities of bias and co-optation (Kjaer 2004:49). Neo-institutional and realist theories predict different impacts of global regimes upon domestic regimes and networks. Comparative research can clarify these complex causal chains.
To develop the Compon project, I received the SSRC/Abe Fellowship from the Center for Global Partnership of the Japan Foundation for 2007. I started organizing the project at the annual conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (Vancouver, April 2006), where several colleagues skilled in network analysis agreed to join. Spreading from that point, country-case investigators in Compon currently include researchers representing 17 cases: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, India, United States, Canada, Brazil, England, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Greece, Italy, and Russia, plus global level networks as a distinct “case.” Investigators come from sociology, political science, anthropology, and mathematics. The cases represent important variation in contextual factors: institutional (pluralistic/corporatistic; democratic, transitional and authoritarian), prosperity (developed/developing), “interest group” (business orientations; strength of civil society), social structural (institutionalized/anomic; atomized/networked/hierarchical) and cultural (relational/negotiated/rule-bound). Given the difficulties in finding funding and time to conduct the national survey, only a subset of the cases may reach completion. The Compon survey project will continue until at least 2010. The survey is modular, so researchers wishing to add new country cases are welcome to contact the organizer (broad001@umn.edu).
Compon held its first conference on January 25-28 at the University of Minnesota. In the public conference, 10 speakers discussing their existing comparative social scientific research on global environmental issues, with a focus on the science-policy interface. In the following workshop, 15 network experts and country case investigators discussed how to build on existing research and design the Compon survey. Conference presentations can be viewed at: http://igs.cla.umn.edu/research/conferences.html. The author is currently in Japan as a visiting researcher at Keio University working on the design of the Compon survey and on the implementation of the Japan case.
REFERENCES
Broadbent, Jeffrey. 1998. Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and
Protest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kjaer, Anne Mette. 2004. Governance. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press Distributed in the
USA by Blackwell Pub.
Knoke, David, Franz Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent, and Yutaka Tsujinaka. 1996. Comparing
Policy Networks: Labor Politics in the U.S., Germany and Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Laumann, Edward O. and David Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Raab, Joerg and Patrick Kenis. 2007. "Taking Stock of Policy Networks: Do They
Matter?" In Handbook of Public Policy Analysis: Theory, Methods and Politics, edited by Fischer, Miller and Sidney.
*To avoid political debates about the issue of national status, the Compon project uses as the unit of analysis the terms “case,” “society” and “polity” instead of nation. In this light, the concept of state refers not necessarily to a “nation-state,” but more generically to the political institutions governing a society. The boundaries of the “society” are defined as coterminous with the limits of territory formally governed by the state. The “polity” consists of the organizations, agencies, associations, publics, powerful individuals, and other voices that have some effect upon the formation of policy measures (Tilly 1978).