Climate change on Twitter: Implications for climate governance research

Abstract

There is increasing public debate about the governance of climate change and its repercussions for nature and human livelihoods. In today's digitalized communication landscape, both public and private actors involved in climate change governance use social media to provide information and to interact with stakeholders and the broader public. This Focus Article discusses two main aspects of debates about climate change and climate governance on Twitter, which previous theories suggest to shape climate governance across domestic and global levels: non-state climate action and public opinion formation on the social media. We see significant advancement in the environmental social sciences studying these two areas. Yet, we also see the need for a better understanding of how public and private actors in the climate governance complex interact on Twitter, and how these actors shape, and are shaped by, experiences, values, and positions. This understanding will help to advance climate governance theories. This article proceeds in three steps. We first discuss previous social media research on non-state climate action and public opinion formation related to climate change and its governance. Then we sketch avenues for future research, elaborating how Twitter data might be used to investigate how non-state climate action and public opinion formation on social media are linked to and influence climate governance. We conclude by making the case for drawing together Twitter data and climate governance research into a more coherent research agenda. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate Change Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance.