Tweeting climate change: analyzing actor diversity and influence in climate-change discourse post-Paris agreement

Abstract

The Paris Agreement represents the notable characteristics of global environmental governance, namely multi-actor and multi-level governance. Despite these changes, limited empirical studies have investigated the actors in global environmental governance who participate in political discourse on climate change. To comprehend whether or not the Paris Agreement’s actors represent the transformation of global environmental governance, we adopted a big-data approach to analyze Twitter’s climate-change discourse. The classification of actors provided an understanding of the diversity of the actors involved in providing public information. We also calculated the closeness centrality and identified the changes in the actors’ influence, comparing the changes in the 5 years since the Agreement was adopted. The results showed an increased diversity of actor types. Non-state actors are not homogeneous in their changes, and Intergovernmental Organizations exhibited an increased influence. The findings indicated that the actors participating in the climate-change discourse post-Paris Agreement partially reflect the changes in global environmental governance.