Between Guilt and Obligation: Debating the Responsibility for Climate Change and Climate Politics in the Media

ABSTRACT

The “common but differentiated responsibility” of developed and developing countries to mitigate climate change is a core principle of international climate politics—but there is disagreement about what this “differentiated responsibility” amounts to. We investigate how newspapers in developed countries (Australia, Germany, United States) and emerging economies (Brazil, India) covered this debate during the UN climate summits in 2004, 2009, and 2014. Newspapers in both types of countries attributed more responsibility to developed than to developing countries. In line with social identity theory, however, media in developed countries attributed less causal responsibility (blame) to other developed countries than media in emerging economies. The latter countries’ media, in turn, attributed less responsibility to other developing countries than media in developed countries. At the same time, in line with the “differentiated responsibility”, media in developed countries attributed more responsibility to their own countries than media in emerging economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Attribution of responsibility
• climate change communication
• climate politics
• quantitative content analysis
• internationally comparative
• social identity theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Some newspapers cannot be retrieved from Factiva or LexisNexis (e.g. the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany). In such cases, we used the digital archives applying the search criteria described above.

2 For each COP we analyzed one week before, the time period during the COP, and one week after the COP. The concrete dates were as follows: COP 2004 in Buenos Aires: November 29 – December 24. COP in 2009 in Copenhagen: November 30 – December 25. COP 2014 in Lima: November 24 –December 19.

3 As a robustness check, we checked whether the results differed when using the topic of the first category (climate change/climate change mitigation/adaption) only. Essentially, results did not differ from the results presented here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (SNSF)) under [Grant number 100018-153651].