Dana R. Fisher
Columbia UniversityWhat do we know: What does Sociology bring to the table for studying the human dimensions of global
climate change?
To date, sociology has made some useful contributions to our understanding of global climate change, building on
research in other fields as well as that which is predominantly situated within the field of sociology itself. Since
many of the scholars who have conducted these studies are participating in this Workshop, I will not summarize
their work. Instead, I will focus on the ways that my work has contributed to our understanding of global climate
change. Because sociology provides such a broad methodological toolbox for studying social phenomena, my
research (as well as the extant sociological research on climate change more generally) has been able to contribute
much more to our understanding of the human dimensions of global climate change. Overall, I believe that
sociology as a field provides opportunities for research that focuses on multiple scales and incorporates mixed
methods in ways that research in other disciplines, such as international relations and economics, cannot. In
particular, by allowing for the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods and analyzing processes at
multiple scales, sociological work on climate change can provide important insights. In addition, I believe that
research that explores the increasingly complex case of climate change has the potential to contribute significantly
to the field of sociology more broadly.
International Comparative Work: My earliest research on climate change came from an international
comparative perspective. Some of this work contributed to the on-going discussion about the relationship between
characteristics of nation states and their emissions (e.g. Roberts and Grimes 1997; Dietz and Rosa 2001; York et
al. 2003a, 2003b). In particular, this study focused on understanding how we can explain the differing levels of
carbon dioxide emissions in advanced industrialized nations. The paper concluded that the strongest predictors
of emissions are measures of ecological efficiency, which tend to be associated with potentially less symbolic
policy decisions (Fisher and Freudenburg 2004). In addition to this quantitative analysis, I also published National
Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime (Fisher 2004), which adds an ethnography of the politics
of climate change to the previously discussed quantitative analysis. This book focuses on the interactions among
stakeholders involved in decision making on climate change in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands.
Coming from a sociological perspective, while incorporating the findings of scholars from other fields, it
provides a deeper understanding of how each country’s position on the Kyoto Protocol emerged by focusing
on national politics and how they interact with international policy-making processes. The book concludes that
understanding the international politics of climate change and the debates surrounding the Kyoto Protocol requires
an exploration of domestic politics and policy-making processes within nation-states.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
Domestic Work on the Relationship between National and Sub-National Scales: More recently, I have continued
my research on climate change decision making in the United States. The first step in this work is an updated and
expanded version of the US chapter of the 2004 book, which was published in Sociological Forum in 2006. Here
again, this research involved a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to understand climate change
policy making. The paper concludes that climate change politics in the United States have been driven by the
ways that natural resources are extracted and consumed at the state level. Building off of these findings, I am
currently working on a project for the Norwegian Center for International Climate and Environmental Research
(CICERO) that is focusing on the relationship between local initiatives to regulate emissions and national politics.
The project aims to analyze the ways that the US Conference of Mayors and the International Council for Local