Social Networks and Climate Change Policy Preferences: Structural Location and Policy Actor Support for Fossil Fuel Production

Abstract

Contrary to what is needed for reducing global GHG emissions, successive Canadian governments have placed fossil fuel production at the core of national economic development. This presents a puzzle: how should we understand contradictory political commitments to the Paris agreement and low carbon energy futures, on one hand, and the persistence of support for fossil fuel centered energy futures, on the other hand. Using a policy network perspective, we ask: Is the location of actors within a climate change policy network associated with their position on curtailing the Alberta oil sands development? Results show that actors’ social network positions are associated with their support for curtailing oil sands development. This network association persists even when the sectoral affiliation and climate change beliefs of actors are statistically controlled. Our results demonstrate that policy network analysis helps explain the persistence of the contradictory politics of fossil fuel development and support for decarbonization.

Keywords:

• Block model
• climate change
• fossil fuel
• oil sands
• policy networks
• social networks

Acknowledgments

A version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Sociology Association at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, on June 5, 2019. The findings from the national survey of the general public in Canada were previously presented at “Communication and Learning in Networks: Potentials and Challenges for Environmental Sustainability,” 4th Lüneburg Workshop on Environmental and Sustainability Communication, Leuphana University Lüneburg, in Lüneburg, Germany, on September 29, 2009. We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback and suggestions. We would also like to thank the following people for their assistance with various aspects of this research: Georgia Piggot, Noelani Dubeta, Gabrielle Schittecatte, Jeffrey Broadbent, Dana R. Fisher, Jill Smith, Tammy Kelderman, Mario Diani, Randolph Haluza-Delay, Joanna Robinson, Andrea Rivers, C. David Gartrell, Philip Leifeld, and Victor Lam.

Notes

1 “Roughly defined” because there are several conceptualizations of structural equivalence and we are using this term in a non-technical sense, akin to approximate equivalence.

2 In describing the blocks we use the term “dominated” in a descriptive statistical sense, to describe the orientation of the actors that make up a plurality of each block.

3 Table 1 provided densities. But another way of looking at these relationships is in terms of frequency of ties. The assertion made in this sentence is based on frequency of ties associated with the Blocks (or aggregate ties associated with each block).

Additional information

Funding

Aspects of this research were supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), grants [# 430-2011-0093 and # 410-2011-710].