A comparative analysis on the international discourse power evaluation of global climate governance

Abstract

The international discourse power (IDP) is necessary to attain the strategic interests and international influence in the global climate governance process. In order to analyze the IDP state of each country, this study proposes a hybrid evaluation approach to assess IDP of global climate governance by integrating analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and cloud model. Firstly, the evaluation index system of IDP of global climate governance was constructed from three aspects namely, discourse subject, discourse production, and discourse dissemination. Secondly, the cloud model is introduced to express the uncertainty and to transform the qualitative evaluation information. Additionally, the AHP is incorporated into the cloud model to calculate the weights of index. Finally, six typical countries of global climate governance are selected to illustrate the application of the proposed evaluation approach. The results indicated that the priority of IDP is EU, the USA, China, Russia, India, and Haiti. Moreover, it is found that China’s IDP has the highest priority in developing countries. However, compared to developed countries, China’s IDP has a relatively low priority. The study suggests to enhance the political influence, expand the international impact of public media, and form a community of interests.