Up with ecology, down with economy? The consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation in the global public sphere

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Up with ecology, down with economy? The consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation in the global public sphere © The Author(s) 2018 Published version Ylä-Anttila, Tuomas; Vesa, Juho; Eranti, Veikko; Kukkonen, Anna; Lehtimäki, Tomi; Lonkila, Markku; Luhtakallio, Eeva Ylä-Anttila, T., Vesa, J., Eranti, V., Kukkonen, A., Lehtimäki, T., Lonkila, M., & Luhtakallio, E. (2018). Up with ecology, down with economy? The consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation in the global public sphere. European Journal of Communication, 33(6), 587-603. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118790155 2018 https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118790155 European Journal of Communication 2018, Vol. 33(6) 587 –603 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0267323118790155 journals.sagepub.com/home/ejc Up with ecology, down with economy? The consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation in the global public sphere Tuomas Ylä-Anttila and Juho Vesa University of Helsinki, Finland Veikko Eranti University of Tampere, Finland Anna Kukkonen and Tomi Lehtimäki University of Helsinki, Finland Markku Lonkila University of Jyväskylä, Finland Eeva Luhtakallio University of Tampere, Finland Abstract Building on theories of valuation and evaluation, we develop an analytical framework that outlines six elements of the process of consolidation of an idea in the public sphere. We then use the framework to analyse the process of consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation between 1997 and 2013, focusing on the interplay between ecological and economic evaluations. Our content analysis of 1274 articles in leading newspapers in five countries around the globe shows that (1) ecological arguments increase over time, (2) economic arguments decrease over Corresponding author: Tuomas Ylä-Anttila, Political Science and Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54, 00014 Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected] 790155EJC0010.1177/0267323118790155European Journal of CommunicationYlä-Anttila et al. research-article2018 Full Length Article 588 European Journal of Communication 33(6) time, (3) the visibility of environmental nongovernmental organizations as carriers of ecological ideas increases over time, (4) the visibility of business actors correspondingly decreases, (5) ecological ideas are increasingly adopted by political and business elites and (6) a compromise emerges between ecological and economic evaluations, in the form of the argument that climate change mitigation boosts, rather than hinders economic growth. Keywords Climate change, ecology, economy, evaluation, news media Introduction How are ideas consolidated in the public sphere? How does something like the idea that nature has a value in itself become generally accepted, to the point that it becomes sensible to argue that ecological values ought to be prioritized over other values, such as economic goods? In his seminal 1972 paper Up and Down with Ecology, Anthony Downs argued that public attention to ecology had been on the rise since the 1960s, but was likely to wane. Downs’ argument was that ecology, like other issues, was to follow what he called the ‘issue attention cycle’, inevitably leading to decline of public interest once the costs of dealing with the problem have been discovered (even though for ecology, this might take somewhat longer than for some other issues; Downs, 1972: 40, 50). In this article, we argue that while public attention to ecology certainly has its ups and downs, the longterm trend is up. Recent studies have shown that public attention to climate change (Schmidt et al., 2013) and environmental issues in general (Djerf-Pierre, 2011: 502) has increased during the past decades, even though there have been short-term periodic fluctuations. We argue that this long-term increase in issue attention has been paralleled by discursive changes where ecological valuations have become more prominent within environment-related public discourses. Specifically, we suggest that ecology has become consolidated as an idea, as a principle of valuation and evaluation that competes with other similar principles, most notably with the principle of economic valuation. We do not claim that ecology will trump over economy in the long term – merely that it has become an idea that can compete with, or sometimes complement, economic evaluations in the public sphere. This line of thinking follows the argument laid out by Lafaye and Thévenot (1993) concerning the rise of the ecological principle of valuation. The argument draws on the more general framework of theories of valuation and evaluation, based on the groundbreaking work by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006/1991) and further developed by Lamont (2012) and Fourcade (2011). Based on this theoretical approach, we sketch out a model outlining six elements of the process through which ideas become consolidated in the public sphere: (1) the increase in the frequency of references to the emerging idea, (2) a corresponding decrease in the frequency of references to opposing ideas, (3) the rise of a new group of actors as institutional carriers of the new idea, (4) a corresponding decline in the presence of actors opposed to the idea, (5) the adoption of the idea by institutionally established Ylä-Anttila et al. 589 actors such as political elites and (6) the emergence of a compromise between the new idea and old ideas opposed to it, whereby the two become accepted as complementary rather than opposing principles of evaluation. We then use the model to develop hypotheses concerning the changes in what is perhaps the most central ecological debate of the recent decades, namely, the debate on climate change mitigation. To test the hypotheses, we use a dataset on climate change media coverage in the news media in five countries over almost two decades, 1997–2013. Our work adds to the existing research on media coverage of climate change in several ways. First, most studies have been single-country cases or two-country comparisons (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Dirikx and Gelders, 2010; Shehata and Hoppman, 2012; Wagner and Payne, 2015), or in the cases where several countries are compared, the focus is most often on simple indicators such as the volume of coverage or studies only cover a short time period (e.g. Broadbent et al., 2016; Kunelius and Eide, 2012; Painter and Ashe, 2012; Schmidt et al., 2013; Schmidt and Schäfer, 2015). We are interested in a more in-depth analysis of global trends, so our sample includes material in four languages from five countries. The countries are the United States, Finland, France, Russia and India, ranging from major players to minor ones, developed to developing countries and covering much political, geographical and journalistic diversity. Second, we are interested in changes over time, so our sample covers a period starting from the early days of global climate change politics, the Kyoto COP in 1997, and ends in 2013. Not many earlier studies on media coverage of climate change have been both broadly comparative and longitudinal (Schäfer and Schmidt, 2014). Third, and most important, we develop a model that focusses on the consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation as a part of a more general conflict of ecological and economic evaluations. Most studies on media coverage of climate change have focused on the portrayal of climate science in the media, the dichotomy between ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’ and on how the well-organized and funded denier coalition and the logic of media reporting has produced the false picture in which a scientific controversy exists over whether climate change is real and caused by human activities (e.g. Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007; Painter and Ashe, 2012). The ideological underpinnings of the climate change debate and the values that participants promote in it have received much less attention (Corry and Jørgensen, 2015). Some important studies have analysed the moral dimension of the debate (Carvalho, 2007; Dirikx and Gelders, 2010; Laksa, 2014; Maeseele and Pepermans, 2017), but so far, these studies have focussed on only one or two countries or short periods of time. Theoretical framework and hypotheses In this article, we analyse the consolidation in the public sphere of a particular type of idea: a moral principle of evaluation, namely, the principle of ecological evaluation. Such principles are based on competing conceptions of the common good (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006/1991; Lafaye and Thévenot, 1993). From this perspective, political debate is essentially about deciding which kinds of common good ought to be emphasized when making decisions. In the case of climate change politics, the most important competing conceptions of the common good are economic good and ecological good. At 590 European Journal of Communication 33(6) the core of this debate is the question: How much ecological good are we willing to sacrifice to produce more economic good? Or, are these two goods perhaps not competing but complementary? Perhaps we can keep up economic growth or even accelerate it and save the ecosystem from destructive warming of the climate at the same time? Principles of evaluation coalesce into repertoires. This means that there is a relatively stable set – a repertoire – of consolidated evaluative principles. Principles of evaluation are consolidated when they are accepted, or at least understood, relatively widely by members of a society – indeed, creative use of the consolidated principles can be seen as a prerequisite to success in political debates (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006/1991; YläAnttila and Luhtakallio, 2016). There is an emerging literature on the nature of repertoires of evaluation and their use in various social settings, from environmental conflicts (Thévenot et al., 2000) to political conflicts in cities (Luhtakallio, 2012), automobile associations (Lonkila, 2011), media debates on globalization (Ylä-Anttila, 2016) and the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon (Eranti, 2017). One thing that this literature has barely touched upon is the question of how new principles of evaluation become consolidated. We argue that the process of consolidation of an idea in the public sphere consists of at least six elements (Figure 1). In the following, we ground each of the six elements in the theoretical literature on valuation and evaluation and the empirical literature on media coverage and politics of climate change. As a result, we present a corresponding set of six hypotheses concerning the changes over time in the media debate on climate change. We hypothesize that the first element of the consolidation of an idea is, quite simply, the increase in the frequency of references to it in the public sphere. Thus, we expect the use of ecological evaluations to increase over time. Earlier empirical research also suggests that this may be the case. The overall level of media attention to climate change has increased sharply over the years (Schmidt et al., 2013). One driver of this increase may be the wider use of ecological argumentation. Research has also shown that scientific consensus on climate change and its anthropocentric causes has strengthened (e.g. Oreskes, 2004), and the publication of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel Figure 1. Analytical framework – consolidation of an idea in the public sphere. Ylä-Anttila et al. 591 on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 was an important turning point in raising public awareness of this consensus (Schmidt et al., 2013). Around that time, a new discourse emerged globally, stressing the scope and severity of the problem (Risbey, 2008). Thus, our first hypothesis is H1: The share of ecological evaluations has increased over time. Second, principles of evaluation are often pitted against one another (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006/1991: 223). In the case of environmental debates, the ecological is often opposed to the economic. As a new principle is evoked more often, old opposing ideas may be crowded out and consequently are referred to less often. Indeed, an earlier study found a decline of ‘economic counter frames’ in the US media from the Kyoto COP in 1997 to the Bali COP in 2007 (Shehata and Hoppman, 2012). In a parallel vein, while economic framing was relatively important in the side events of early COPs, other frames have overshadowed it in later years (Hjerpe and Buhr, 2014: 118). Thus, our second hypothesis is: H2: The share of economic evaluations has decreased over time. Third, we posit that new ideas are often carried by new groups of actors. In the case of environmentalist ideas, research has documented the important role of environmental nongovernmental organizations, especially international ones, in this respect (Hironaka, 2014). As regards climate change mitigation in particular, studies have detected an increase in the number of environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) organizing around the climate issue and attending the UN summits during past decades (Hanegraaff, 2015; Muñoz Cabré, 2011; Ylä-Anttila and Swarnakar, 2017). ENGOs have also been successful in utilizing ‘PR strategies and tactics to influence the direction and tone of the media and policy discussion’ (Greenberg et al., 2011: 77). They increasingly ‘co-produce’ news with journalists at the COPs, and this can result in media outlets adopting similar frames as the NGOs (Lück et al., 2016). The activities of international NGOs, especially, have been shown to be ‘important drivers of media attention for climate change’ (Schäfer et al., 2014). Thus, our third hypothesis is H3: The share of claims made by NGOs has increased over time. Fourth, we hypothesize that as a new idea becomes increasingly consolidated and organizations promoting it increasingly visible, the visibility of those organizations that oppose the new idea correspondingly decreases. In the case of the idea of climate change mitigation, the strongest opponents have been business organizations. Indeed, research has suggested that in the recent years, businesses have at least in some countries taken an approach of ‘strategic invisibility’ (Lester and Hutchins, 2012), withdrawing from mainstream media discourse and instead funding think tanks who focus on denying the scientific consensus on climate change (Dunlap and McCright, 2015). Thus, we hypothesize 592 European Journal of Communication 33(6) H4: The share of claims made by business organizations has decreased over time. A fifth element in the consolidation process, we posit, is that the idea spreads out from its original group of promoters and becomes adopted by established actors (cf. YläAnttila, 2016: 252–253). Particularly important here is acceptance among those who have the power to make decisions that have direct consequences on levels of greenhouse gas emissions, that is, politicians and business organizations. Thus, we hypothesize: H5: The share of ecological evaluations has increased over time more among established actors (governments, businesses) than among NGOs. Sixth, one of the most important elements of the theories of valuation and evaluation is the notion of a compromise between two evaluative principles (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006/1991: 277). Actors who disagree can always stick to their preferred principle of evaluation and just keep on trying to out-argue each other. Alternatively, they may attempt to forge a compromise between two principles, arguing that they are complementary instead of conflicting. Forging such a compromise is a further step in the process of consolidation of an idea. Compromises strengthen consolidation because they attract wider acceptance, new allies and weaken critiques based on other evaluative principles. In the case of climate change mitigation, the idea that ecological and economic objectives are compatible may find acceptance of the general public that wants to avoid guilt when driving a car to work, attract allies form business corporations making money off solar panels and electric cars and weaken critiques from those who still insist that growth must rely on fossil fuels. In the environmental social sciences, the compromise between ecological and economic evaluative principles has long been promoted by the ecological modernization school (Jänicke, 2008; Mol, 2002). We expect this kind of thinking to have increased in the climate change debate as the idea of mitigation has become more strongly consolidated over time, at the same time as those economic evaluations that are explicitly opposed to ecology have declined. A further reason to expect such change in the media debate is that earlier studies have detected a similar development in policy discourses (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2016: 8; Isaksen and Stokke, 2014). Thus, we hypothesize the following H6: The share of eco-modern evaluations of all economic evaluations has increased over time. Data and method Our sample includes material from five countries: the United States, Finland, France, Russia and India. We began by selecting one leading quality newspaper from each country (Table 1). These are The New York Times (United States), Le Monde (France), Helsingin Sanomat (Finland), The Hindu (India) and Kommersant (Russia). Due to the labour-intensive nature of manual coding, we were faced with the choice of either selecting two newspapers from each country or including as many countries as coder resources Ylä-Anttila et al. 593 allowed. We chose the latter, because we are interested in global trends, not in differences between countries. The two exceptions to this rule were India and Russia. Because data from The Hindu was not available electronically for 1997, we used data from the country’s other two major newspapers in English, The Times of India and The Economic Times for that year. After discovering that the level of coverage in Russia was so low that no meaningful results could have been produced by using just one newspaper, we added two others, Izvestya and Trud. From each newspaper, we searched articles on climate change during the following United Nations Climate Conferences: Kyoto 1997, Copenhagen 2009 and Durban 2011 (for France and the United States) and Warsaw 2013 (for Finland, India and Russia).1 These data points were chosen with the aim of looking at long-term trends in mind. We sampled a period beginning 7 days before each conference and ending 7 days after. Electronic archives were used to search for articles that mentioned ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ or ‘greenhouse effect’ or the name of the city where the current COP was taking place. From the search results, we removed duplicates and articles that did not deal with climate change. This resulted in a total of 1274 articles. There are marked differences in the number of articles published in different countries: for instance, we found 523 articles in India but only 30 in Russia (see Table 1). The low number of articles in Russia is in line with earlier research showing that the Russian media has paid little attention to climate change (Poberezhskaya, 2015). Our unit of analysis is a claim, defined as a ‘unit of action in the public sphere’ (Koopmans and Statham, 1999; Ylä-Anttila and Luhtakallio, 2016). It can be, for instance, a statement made in an interview, an op-ed, or the publication of a study that is reported in the media. One newspaper article may, therefore, contain several claims or none at all. In total, we found 1196 claims that included evaluations, and these claims constitute our final sample. For each claim, we coded the type of the organization presenting the claim (see categories in Table 3) and the type of evaluation (ecological, economic, eco-modern and Table 1. Overview of empirical data. Country Newspaper COPs Articles Claims with evaluations Finland Helsingin Sanomat Kyoto, Copenhagen, Warsaw 263 172 France Le Monde Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban 363 316 India The Economic Times, The Times of India (1997), The Hindu (2009; 2013) Kyoto, Copenhagen, Warsaw 523 354 Russia Kommersant, Izvestya, Trud Kyoto, Copenhagen, Warsaw 30 63 United States The New York Times Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban 95 291 Total N 1274 1196 594 European Journal of Communication 33(6) Table 2. Coding examples: ecological, economic and eco-modern evaluations. Who: Speaker What: Content Why: Evaluation NGO (Yuyun Indradi, Greenpeace Southeast Asia) ‘We are heading towards ecological disaster … Kampar is one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet. Its peatlands, 15 metres deep, can store up to 2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. If they were burned, the environmental consequences would be dramatic’. (Le Monde, 3 December 2009) Ecological Politician (Newt Gingrich, US House Speaker) ‘The House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, said the United States “surrendered” to pressure in Kyoto and called the proposed treaty “an outrage.” He said the accord would cripple the American economy’. (The New York Times, 12 December 1997) Economic (‘economy over ecology’) Politician (Andrus Ansip, Estonian Prime Minister) ‘We are convinced that the fight against global warming could even contain the solution to the current economic crisis’. (Le Monde, 7 December 2009) Eco-Modern other). Within the category of economic evaluations, thus, we separated between those that resisted climate change mitigation on economic grounds (‘economy over ecology’) and those that saw climate change mitigation and economic growth as mutually supportive, rather than competing goals (‘eco-modern’ evaluations).2 The evaluative component of the claim usually answers the question why something should or should not be done to curb climate change. Table 2 presents an example of each of the three main types of evaluations analysed in this article. For the identification of claims, we used the codebook developed by Koopmans (2002). For identification of evaluations, we trained our coders and developed our own codebook through coding a sample of 71 articles reporting on the COP 14, that is, Table 3. Use of ecological arguments by different types of actors in 1997–2013 (per cent of claims with evaluations). 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