“I want you to act as if our house is on fire!” Framing Climate Change: Women Climate Activists’ Collective Action Frames

UC 333

Climate activists urgently emphasize collective action and global institutional change to prevent irreversible damage to human and natural systems from climate change. However, global institutional responses to climate change have been deemed ineffective and slow, and this has been linked to gender imbalance within dominant international climate change negotiations and research. Research shows improved climate change responses and policy agendas when there is greater gender balance within climate negotiations and research. More effective climate responses and policy agendas are dependent on a shared understanding of the problem. This is communicated through the way we frame, or interpret, the phenomenon. Framing is a method of organizing the ways in which people interpret a phenomenon by establishing a shared sense of meaning. A collective action frame involves four steps: identify the (1) problem; (2) causes of the problem; (3) solutions to the problem; and (4) ways to engage others to take solution-oriented actions. Collective action frames against climate change can inform policy agendas by raising alternative questions and solutions, acknowledging more neglected issues, and including marginalized perspectives. I will qualitatively analyze the characteristics of women climate activists’ collective action frames against climate change through 20 in-depth, in-person interviews. Because climate change has only recently become a dominant political narrative, my approach is unique in that interview data will be compared between women who are 18 – 36 years versus women who are 55 years and older to explore the extent to which collective action frames vary by age. Variations of collective action frames of climate change across women of two generations might reveal different climate change policy agendas.