Coalitional Architecture of Climate Change Litigation Networks in the United States

Abstract

Understanding how coalitions battle to advance or slow down regulatory efforts to address climate change is critical to assess the likelihood that regulatory approaches can succeed in curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. This requires a thorough examination of how coalitions form and are structured. We focus our analysis on the Obama administration's "Climate Action Plan," aimed to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from the operation of oil and gas facilities, transportation, and electricity generation. We focus on coalitional behavior when actors litigate either in favor or against each of these rules and reconstruct the comprehensive network of stakeholder relations across court cases by recreating the network of cosigners of documents submitted during the litigation process. We identify two main coalitions of pro-and anti-regulation actors and assess their coalitional strategies. We use descriptive statistics, baseline models, and community detection algorithms to explore participation patterns related to level of participation, cross-regulation activity, clustering, and homophily based subcoalitions.

Climate Change and the Voluntary Sector: An Introduction

“…Work in this cluster of 18 (22%) articles addresses voluntary organizations in local environmental politics (e.g., Daneri et al, 2021), environmental justice movements (Vandepitte et al, 2019), advocacy and litigation coalitions (Aamodt, 2018; Holm & Berardo, 2020; Nilsen et al, 2018), the role of religious and indigenous organizations in environmental conservation teaching and awareness (e.g., Brown et al, 2021; Ellingson et al, 2012; Mlaki & Massawe, 2019; Standley et al, 2009), nonprofit scientific institutions as brokers of credible climate change information (e.g., Wagner et al, 2021), and the role of voluntary organizations in participatory governance or as democracy-building, bottom-up actors in climate action (e.g., Greenspan et al, 2022; Van Veelen & Eadson, 2019). Two articles address advocacy organizations vis-à-vis the commercial sector (e.g., Odziemkowska, 2022; Spitz et al, 2021).…”

The implications of COVID-19 for concepts and practices of citizenship

“…Second, studies highlight the need for collaboration to address environmental issues, such as climate change (Hamilton and Lubell, 2018;Dany and Lebel, 2020;Holm and Berardo, 2020), wildlife protection (Duit and Löf, 2018;Sullivan, 2019), watershed governance (Mewhirter et al, 2019;García and Bodin, 2019;Hui et al, 2020) and environmental protection Hensengerth and Lu, 2019), with diverse perspectives. Some studies reveal the context of collaboration.…”

Social identities in climate action

“…There exists a large body of research on the role of social identities for individual behavior intended to reduce negative consequences for the environment (Clayton and Manning 2018), so this article is especially intended to transfer the social identity perspective to the political context. In doing so, it contributes to the analysis of climate action strategies that are increasingly subject to public policy research (Holm and Berardo 2020;Koski and Siulagi 2016), but also to the interdisciplinary exchange on how to promote climate action.…”