Under a given international climate change regime or set of institutional rules, nations respond differently
according to the respective conditions. The key knowledge transmission runs from the IPCC at the international
level to receptor organizations in the different national cases, through them into prevalent discourse, participatory
forums and advocacy coalitions, and finally into the content of decisions. The strength of advocacy coalitions
(conflict) and the functionality of participatory forums (persuasion) should determine the effectiveness of this
information flow into policy. Contributing to their effect should be a number of impinging social factors: the
credibility and capacity of the national scientific community, the strength of civil society, the legitimacy of the
national bureaucracy, the reliability of the rule of law, the institutions that aggregate and represent public demands
(electoral rules, parties), and the existing patterns of diverse networks (information sharing, political support,
mutual aid and authoritative guidance). For instance, one hypothesis is that nations with corporatistic political
institutions (Japan, Sweden, Austria, Sweden), because of their participatory policy-making venues, should learn
more readily and produce greener environmental decisions than other political systems. In addition, the effect of
cultural fields of national discourse with their typical beliefs and judgments about climate change pose additional
questions for investigation. For instance, are highly religious as opposed to secular cultures necessarily more
resistant to accepting the reality of anthropogenic climate change?
One problem with conducting this type of inquiry has been the inadequacy of our methods. Until
recently, the social sciences had no empirical method to study the variety of interactive, relational processes
among actors that constitute macro-formations (nation-state bounded societies) and build up into macro-level
behavioral outcomes. Over the past several decades, though, sociology has developed that, suitably tweaked,
offers this research capacity: policy network analysis. This approach (developed by Laumann, Pappi, Knoke
and others) allows the researcher to trace and compare the patterns and effects of different relational patterns
and belief fields among actors as they contribute to large-scale decisions and social change. This kind of data
permits the comparative testing of the posited hypotheses. The project on Comparing Climate Change Policy
Networks (Compon, PI Broadbent) gathers matched empirical data on these patterns and fields in 19 countries
and at the international level, as they react to climate change and its international regimes. This empirical study
will bring evidence to bear upon the crucial questions enunciated above, while at the same time establishing a
global network of research institutes on the social science of climate change and providing an open-use data
set for further research on these issues. The Compon project is now collaborating on this effort with Climate
Central, a project based at Princeton and Stanford Universities to improve natural science related public education
concerning climate change.