Clearing the air: the contribution of frame analysis to understanding climate policy in the United States

Abstract

Frame analysis illuminates the politics of climate change and generates ideas about discursive strategies that can assist national governments to take effective action on climate change. The nature of frame analysis and its links to discourse theory and social constructivist epistemology are discussed, and this framework used to show how climate change politics in the USA under the second Bush Presidency (2001–2008) have been viewed through at least three contrasting frames: scientific scepticism; climate change as a security threat; and climate change as an economic opportunity. The last of these frames, which uses the Apollo metaphor to liken the task of controlling climate change to the effort during the 1960s to put a man on the moon, is especially promising due to the wide appeal of its positive framing of climate policy in terms of technological achievement, industrial transformation and economic opportunity.

Keywords:

• climate change
• climate policy
• frame analysis
• discourse analysis