Paving the way or crowding out? The impact of the rise of climate change on environmental issue agendas

Adapted to Climate Change? Issue Portfolios of Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in the Americas

“…Following Boscarino (2015), who argues persuasively that websites represent the main channel for ENGOs to communicate with their members, with donors, and with potential allies for policy advocacy, we relied on the ENGOs’ websites to produce a dataset for testing the hypotheses formulated in the previous section. With the exception of six ENGOs, who used Facebook or LinkedIn to present their profiles (flagged in Table A1 in the Appendix), the websites were similarly resourceful despite the ENGOs being located in different countries.…”

“…To test H2, we chose wildlife-focused ENGOs as the reference category. This choice was motivated by Boscarino’s (2015) study which showed that the U.S. National Wildlife Federation does not support climate action because its members and supporters are not generally interested in it. What is more, the leadership of the organization stated that it hesitates to create a connection with climate change because the wider public is considered to be skeptical of it, which could have an adverse effect on the organization’s environmentalist work (Boscarino, 2015, p. 106).…”

“…Pursuing this goal comes at the expense of using less granular data than would be required for a rigorous testing of the model put forth by Halpin et al (2018). It also means that tracing changes in the issue portfolios of ENGOs over time, in the manner of Boscarino (2015) or E. W. Johnson (2006), is not feasible.…”

“…The emergence of climate change as a salient topic entails the question of how traditional ENGOs have positioned themselves on this issue (see Boscarino, 2015). This is an important question for both theoretical and practical reasons.…”

Addressing climate change through climate action

“…A further consideration is the potential trade-offs between implementing climate action and achieving other dimensions of sustainable development. In this context, one of the questions asked in the literature is whether environmental NGOs have started to pay less attention to environmental concerns, because climate change has become (overly) salient (Boscarino, 2015). Building on the same notion of salience, and how it directs political attention to certain issues at the expense of others, Legagneux et al (2018) showed in their study of scientific literature and press articles addressing climate change and biodiversity in Canada, the UK, and the USA, that media coverage of climate change was up to eight times higher than for biodiversity.…”