"Necessity has made us allies": The role of coalitions in the climate change negotiations

In this chapter we investigate how the various types of coalitions involved in the climate change negotiations differ in terms of their levels of participation in oral negotiations and why. We rely on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Resource Dependence Theory to propose hypotheses regarding what types of coalitions are expected to adopt a more central role at the negotiations. Using data on negotiation interactions for the period 1995–2013 obtained from the Earth Negotiations Bulletins, we build annual networks of cooperative negotiation behaviour, and calculate various network centrality measures (degree, closeness, betweenness) for the identified coalitions. We use a combination of descriptive analysis of these annual networks with regression analysis to test our theory. Our findings suggest that regional, climate-focused, larger, and older coalitions tend to play a more central role in the negotiations, both in terms of their levels of activity (degree) and of how they act as bridges between their members and all other parties (betweenness).