IFFS PLAY

Recently, researchers have tried to identify various positive social tipping points that could help societies shift rapidly toward a sustainable, post-carbon future. One of the social tipping interventions identified is the values and norms system, i.e. the frames used in a society to decide what is punished and what is rewarded. Climate protest movements are explicitly identified as key actors, who could potentially trigger tipping in the normative and values system, i.e. they are identified as norm entrepreneurs. In this talk Viktoria Spaiser and Nicole Nisbett will present results from a work in progress on identifying and quantifying the influence that climate protest movements, and in particular the Fridays for Future movement, are having on public climate change discourse around the annual UNFCCC climate change conferences, tracking the evolution of the discourse between 2014 and 2021 using large Twitter data and transformers-based topic modelling. Moreover, key actors involved in the changing discourse are identified through a bipartite network analysis. The results show the moral power that norm entrepreneurs can have in shifting the frames used to understand the climate crisis and identify solutions, disrupting what is considered common sense. But the results also show that normative change is only emerging, not yet consolidated and hence vulnerable to undermining factors. #fridaysforfuture #impact #cop