Social Networks最新文献

How do individuals make sense of the specific issues that motivate them when they participate in activism? Are there clear and consistent patterns of motivations among participants and organizers within a movement over time? This paper applies network methods to a unique dataset to understand the relationships and structure formed among the issues that activists cited as motivation for their participation in a series of climate-related demonstrations over a three-year period. We test whether these networks of issue motivations form coherent structures, and whether they reflect the growing emphasis on social justice within the climate movement. Our findings highlight the coherence in the structure of relationships among motivations to participate, especially the centrality of ‘Equality’ as a motivation within our sampled cycle of contention.

We investigate the psycho-linguistic features of the online discourse over climate change, focusing on its modifications throughout the years 2017–2019 as a result of collective actions emerging and spreading worldwide. We seek to understand the emerging connection between digital activism and the psychological processes related to its social drives. To this end, a semantic network is derived from the social platform Twitter, and its evolution is traced over time, tracking textual proxies of social identity and empowerment. Original proposals are made to identify communities and highlight the most important semantic contents of the corpus from a network perspective. These evaluations on semantic communities of related concepts further detail the shift in the rhetoric of collective actions. Finally, we explore projection of the ingroup to the future in the online discourse about climate change, which can point to developments of pro-environmental campaigns.

Extant research on policy networks tends to focus on explaining successes and/or failures of particular policy efforts. One commonly used theoretical framework – the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) – focuses on actor attributes external to policy networks. We argue this leads to an incomplete understanding of the social dynamics of climate change policy making. We incorporate a policy network analytic approach with the ACF in an ERGM of collaboration in a Canadian climate change policy network, showing the role micro-structural network processes play in giving rise to informal policy networks. We find certain policy beliefs are correlated with tie formation. We also find micro-structural network processes related to reciprocity, structural equivalence and transitive closure are correlated with tie formation. We argue combining these two prominent streams of policy network literature has potential to improve our understanding of climate change policy making processes.

As climate change impacts the Great Lakes region, the increased frequency and intensity of precipitation events are dramatically increasing the erosive effects of stormwater in the ravine ecosystem. Because formal governance structures may not be effective in providing coordination during turbulent and dynamic events, those seeking to manage natural resources during climate change may turn to resources located in their social networks. In this study network analysis was used to visualize collegial ties and self-reported consideration of climate change among those managing ravines along southwestern Lake Michigan. Professional development then leveraged the visualizations to modify the network, potentially increasing knowledge flows and coordination. Those who were targeted by the intervention increased their engagement in the network and contributed to bridging between subgroups to fill structural holes. This provides insight into the potential for interventions that leverage baseline network analysis for the management of natural resources in the context of climate change.

Local authorities play a key role in tackling climate change by implementing targeted adaptation and mitigation measures. The specific implementation of a mix of adaptation and mitigation strategies is the outcome of the interaction of policymakers through a political debate and their attitudes towards climate change. By concentrating on the political discourses occurring in the Assembly of an Italian region (Emilia-Romagna), we use a multi-method approach of Discourse Network Analysis and Concept Mapping to investigate local policymakers’ positioning. Our investigation shows that actors are grouped not only according to their political affiliation, but also to the debated topics, and this relates to the preference for supporting adaptation or mitigation measures, which characterizes the local policy debate.

We examined how scientific information influences policy beliefs among organizations in climate change policy networks in Germany and Japan. Different combinations of information types, policy beliefs, and organizational roles were found to play instrumental roles. Ideational influence can occur when (1) the sender is a credible information source, (2) the receiver can understand the “message,” and (3) the receiver depends on the sender’s information. Organizational roles involved in this ideational influence are different in technical and political information exchange. The leverage of influence depends on the organizational ecology of different roles in each country.

There is a clear consensus among climate scientists about the reality and serious consequences of anthropogenic climate change. However, a vocal minority challenges this consensus. While some research has drawn attention to how conservative foundations support these anti-consensus scientists, less is known about how these scholars are embedded within the broader scientific community. Here, we analyze the networks of anti-consensus and consensus scientists and observe the extent to which these groups are maintained through peer collaborations (e.g. co-authorship) or substantive focus (e.g. research specialization). Using bibliometric data, we construct co-authorship and bibliographic networks linking scientists that appear in two key reports representing the consensus and anti-consensus positions. We identify specialty areas using text analysis and model participation in either series of reports. Results indicate that anti-consensus scientists are not in the same network as consensus scientists and have somewhat different research specializations than consensus scientists although there is substantive overlap. Additionally, anti-consensus scientists do not form a coherent network among themselves, which suggests they do not constitute a separate scientific community, but rather are composed of a disparate group of idiosyncratic scientists.

In public debates, climate change communication tends to polarize into communities for and against the scientific basis of global warming. We analyze mention networks on Twitter around the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 2 and 3 reports that were published in March–April 2014. Building upon earlier research into climate skepticism and polarization of climate change debate, we focus on the relative prominence of different types of Twitter user accounts, in terms of engagement with other users and their alignments towards the scientific basis of climate change. We distinguish a “heart” actively discussing IPCC from a “shadow”, which more anecdotally mentions IPCC and is likely to correspond to the remainder of a public space minimally interested in IPCC-related reports. We develop an original network analysis framework that enables us to analyze and deconstruct the inner structure of this heart’s strongly intertwined engagement dynamics. Interesting observations relate to the position of critical users, who are in the minority, but are in relative terms most engaged with and most engaging with other users in this arena, while the media, casual users and governmental agencies occupy relatively less prominent positions. We further qualify the various structural positions by demonstrating that they correspond to different types of vocabulary specific to user types and positions. This socio-semantic approach may be generally helpful to disentangle semantic and structural polarization in online conversation spaces where opposing poles precisely appear to be mixing.

Climate change governance networks help actors overcome collective action problems by building social capital. The literature studies these networks as embodying a single underlying social problem: coordination or cooperation. This approach overlooks actor heterogeneity and cannot account for the empirical coexistence of different types of social capital. We contend that climate change governance networks consist of functionally differentiated communities of actors who build bonding or bridging social capital depending on their characteristics and goals. We test these claims with an Affiliation Graph Model (AGM) in the empirical case of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area, using original data collected in 2018. We distinguish three social processes: ‘leadership/brokerage’, ‘translation’, and ‘following’. Further research on different combinations of social capital across different networks is warranted.

Policy discourses are important platforms for political actors to express their preferences on certain issues and are usually linked to a specific policy subsystem. From a research perspective, they have the potential to indicate ideological coalitions, policy change and learning. Using discourse network analysis, we identify core policy actors, issues, and coalitions in Switzerland’s climate policy discourse and investigate how they have evolved over the past 15 years. In line with the policy process literature, we expected to see more stability than change in the discourse linked to the mature climate policy subsystem. However, our results have shown that policy discourses are more volatile than policy subsystems, and that national and international policy developments are able to trigger change, particularly in terms of the configuration of actor coalitions and the issues discussed.