The Climate Constituencies Project
This project studies how climate policy networks around the United States are evolving. It answers questions related to political polarization, scientific information diffusion and collaboration among policy elites working on the issues of climate change and clean energy. Our research maps out the clusters that are forming around particular climate-related issues, what explains the formation of these clusters, and how they are related to specific policy actors. The methodology and findings in this project build on the NSF-funded COMPON project, for which Dana R. Fisher was Co-PI and ran the US case study (NSF BCS-0826892, PI-Broadbent). The project integrates data collected from public documents, social media, and from policy actors engaged in the debates around climate/clean energy issues.
Data were collected in 2016 and 2017 funded by grants from the MacArthur Foundation (#G-1604-150842 and # G-16-1609-151514-CLS). Along with the federal level, data collected during these two waves of the study focused on state-level activities in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. A new wave of data collection is currently in progress (Climate Constituencies Project 2021) funded by The William And Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG), and the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern.
Link to Project Results
Project Team:
Dana R. Fisher, PhD
Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Program for Society and the Environment
University of Maryland
drfisher@umd.edu
Karin Ingold, PhD
Professor of Policy Analysis and Environmental Governance (PEGO)
Institute of Political Science & Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) University Bern
Environmental Social Sciences, EAWAG, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science & Technology
karin.ingold@unibe.ch
Marlene Kammerer, PhD
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) & Institute of Political Science
University of Bern
marlene.kammerer@unibe.ch
W. Christopher Jayko
Master's Student
Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR)
University of Bern
wcjayko7@gmail.com
Sohana Nasrin
Ph.D. Candidate
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
University of Maryland
sohana@terpmail.umd.edu