How Australian environmental non-governmental organisations frame and enact climate justice

How Australian environmental non-governmental organisations frame and enact climate justice | npj Climate Action

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine how Australian environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) communicate about and mobilise their supporters for climate justice. ENGOs play an important role in raising awareness and changing values, attitudes and behaviours related to climate justice. However, while many Australian ENGOs have begun incorporating language around climate justice in their communications, it remains unclear how this concept is framed and enacted in practice. Using data collected from 619 ENGO websites and 149 grant applications, we examine how ENGOs describe climate justice and the collective action frames they use to mobilise action. We found that while few ENGOs provided detailed explanations of climate justice on their websites, they primarily framed climate injustice as a procedural and distributive problem. The fossil fuel sector was most commonly identified as the cause of climate injustice, and First Nations communities most commonly affected. ENGOs linked different climate justice dimensions to diverse causes, issues and actions, indicating a nuanced understanding of how climate justice can be enacted in different contexts. However, they primarily proposed incremental tactics involving education, solidarity and allyship behaviours rather than radical actions through which to drive a transformative agenda of social, political or economic change. We conclude the paper with a discussion of applied implications for ENGOs and suggestions for future research.

Introduction

As the climate crisis continues to escalate, environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) advocating for action on climate change have become increasingly aware of the inequities of its impacts and the changes required to address them 1, 2. ENGOs play an important role in building understanding and action on climate justice by articulating the complex mechanisms of justice and linking these to the everyday concerns of different groups 3. They also engage with these concerns to develop new politics or resistance strategies to address them 2, 4, using their narrative power to mobilise their supporters to alleviate injustice 5, 6. However, little empirical research has closely examined how ENGOs understand climate justice 7. To explore this issue, the paper first examines the emergence and features of climate justice and collective action frames within the broader environmental movement. It then employs thematic analysis to examine the utilisation of these frames by Australian ENGOs, based on data collected from 619 ENGO websites and 149 grant applications.

The concept of climate justice incorporates ideas related to social justice within the discourse surrounding climate action, climate adaptation and climate policy 1. First used in 1990 in regard to battles with the fossil fuel industry 8, the concept then developed into two strands after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 9. The first of these underpinned a push for incremental change, mainly led by Global North groups which framed climate change as a problem solvable within existing political and technical systems and focused primarily on mitigation 10. In contrast, Global South groups sought transformational change, framing climate change as a social problem associated with inequitable structures and neoliberal capitalism 11. Over the following decades, small island states raised the alarm about the need for urgent action, arguing that despite their limited contribution to climate change, they were on the frontline of its consequences due to high exposure, existing vulnerability, significant disaster impacts and lack of coping capacities 12, 13. Pacific Island countries (PIC), in particular, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, have demanded increased recognition of disproportional impacts and taken a leading role in calling for climate justice 14. Oceanian environmental activists have sought to raise awareness of unjust impacts, linking the preservation of indigenous land rights through challenging colonial and corporate extractive interests

This evolving climate justice discourse built on established environmental justice principles, highlighting how complex political, social, and economic pressures and inequality of power can generate disproportional impacts on some communities 12. Accordingly, by the mid-2000s, the concept of climate justice expanded to include a plurality of justice definitions, including disenfranchisement, inequity, and undermining of individuals’ and communities’ basic needs. ENGOs, more specifically, have increasingly connected climate change with human rights and uneven development 15, as well as other issues such as capitalism, militarism, gender and food production 16. However, despite a recent wave of research exploring applications and understandings of climate justice in different political and social contexts, the concept remains ideologically contested 1. This contestation arises from the new rights, responsibilities and compensation issues that are continually being raised by different actors such as activists, policymakers, governments and academics 17. Some researchers have also argued that ENGO complicity with state and business interests maintains capitalist power relations and undermines any potential for deep transformative and just change 18. Interventions such as carbon offset projects and neoliberal conservation projects may duplicate past injustices by leading to impoverishment, displacement and degradation 19, generating responses focusing on disproportionate outcomes of such projects rather than a systematic critique of capitalism’s role in perpetuating climate injustice. Within and as a response to this debate, multiple different dimensions of climate justice have been proposed, which we consider in the following section.

This paper considers six dimensions of climate justice: distributive, procedural, recognition, intergenerational, relational and transformative. Distributive and procedural are the most common justice dimensions identified in research examining ENGOs and climate justice. ENGOs often articulate distributive justice by highlighting the inequitable distribution of climate impacts, noting who is disproportionally affected by climate change and who bears the greater costs. In doing so, they call for attention around inequitable outcomes and the need for compensation 20. ENGOs seek to enact procedural justice by consistently demanding the inclusion of impacted communities in decision-making 8. Their calls for increased representation and participation of marginalised groups in political, economic and social spheres is a fundamental characteristic of social movements 9.

Recognition justice calls for recognition of and respect for difference, linking climate change to the exacerbation of existing inequalities 21. Studies considering intergenerational justice usually examine youth-focused ENGOs such as Fridays for Future, noting the rising concern about the impacts of climate change on future generations and consideration of what is owed to hypothetical unborn generations 7, 17. Intergenerational justice has also been linked to human rights violations, such as rights to be free from climate change impacts and ecological destruction 8, 22. Mainly developed for post-conflict contexts, relational justice calls for the development of collaborative relationships fostered through dialogue and negotiation, within which justice can be produced 23. This dimension highlights tensions in global responses to climate change, with effective climate governance being hindered by political disagreements, climate change conspiracy theories and distrust in adaptation strategies 24. While, to the authors’ knowledge, no studies have specifically analysed the extent to which ENGOs conceptualise relational climate justice, various studies have noted the importance of quality relationships in developing equitable climate change mitigation and adaptation responses 25. Finally, of particular relevance for ENGOs is transformative justice, which focuses on the social and institutional inequalities that drive and perpetuate climate change and responses to it, arguing for the need to remake these power structures 26. In practice, ENGOs’ conceptualisation of climate justice can both exhibit multiple dimensions and vary in approach 27.

ENGOs often seek to create change by mobilising supporters to take action to address environmental issues 28, which they do through translating concepts such as climate justice into collective action frames 29. These frames construct meanings and ideas that aim to mobilise supporters, assert ENGOs’ legitimacy to act on issues relevant to their interests and groups, and demobilise or defuse the power of their opponents 30, 31, 32. They provide the avenue through which groups can make and share claims about climate justice concepts, processes and suitable responses 6, 33. Accordingly, they have been described as a central dynamic in understanding social movements 29.

Collective action frames have three core components: identifying the problem and attributing blame to specific actors perceived as responsible for it (diagnostic frame), providing a rationale for people to take action to address the problem (motivational frame), and recommending solutions to the problem (prognostic frame). Diagnostic frames identify the problem as well as who is responsible and who is aggrieved 34. In Australia, as with other fossil fuel-dependent economies, research suggests that ENGOs recognise the fossil fuel industry as one of the causes of climate injustice and target them consistently in their campaigns 35. With regard to those aggrieved, Australian research suggests that colonialism, alongside the corporatization of water, land and food, has had disproportionately negative effects on First Nations communities 15, 36. Other research in the Australian context has shown that impacts of climate change are also felt by young people and people with pre-existing medical conditions, older people and people experiencing homelessness, while those living with a lower income, women, people from culturally and diverse backgrounds and fossil fuel workers face economic barriers to mitigating or adapting to climate change impacts

Motivational frames refer to the rationales used to encourage supporters to engage in actions seeking to address climate injustice. These frames can emphasise potential beneficial outcomes, reasons for engagement, and any available resources that could help build their supporters’ sense of agency in helping bring about those outcomes 29, 34. It remains unclear what motivational frames are used by diverse ENGOs across a movement, with most studies focusing on selected groups using disruptive tactics such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Fridays for Future (FFF). For example, Ahlers found that both XR and FFF motivational framing utilised a sense of urgency as a means to mobilise action 37. Smiles and Edward found that XR activists used a motivational frame which argued that action was required in order to protect human lives and wellbeing 31, 38. Motivational frames can also convey group agency by highlighting existing ENGOs resources which may maximise the likelihood of success 29. These resources can include existing networks, the ability to raise adaptation capacity to help minimise disproportional impacts, specialist expertise, shared identity, past successes and financial and human resources 39.

The prognostic frame encompasses language around solutions which can be achieved through action, as well as the specific activities (also described as ‘tactics’) that individuals can undertake on behalf of the group to address climate injustice 40. At the strategic level, some studies have argued that the climate justice movement asserts that the root cause of the problem is capitalism, and thus climate justice requires the end of the capitalist global economic system 9. However, research on XR members reveals that even ENGOs utilising radical tactics may instead promote more incremental changes, such as technological solutions and encouraging personal private pro-environmental behaviours 31. At the tactical level, mobilising supporters to take collective action is a fundamental function of social movements 41. Understanding what tactics ENGOs link to climate justice thus indicates how they seek to enact it through their activities. However, very few studies have considered the specific tactics ENGOs enact to address climate justice, with most studies focusing solely on ENGOs engaging in disruptive protest and examining prognostic frames at a strategic, rather than tactical, level 31, 37. Studies analysing ENGOs and transformative justice argue that ENGOs utilise awareness-raising and direct action as tactics to enact transformative justice 26. Yet evidence suggests that only a small minority of ENGOs utilise disruptive protest, instead primarily promoting information-sharing tactics, such as organising film nights and information evenings 42.

In this study, we examine how Australian ENGOs conceptualise and enact climate justice through an analysis of website communication and grant application statements. Websites allow ENGOs to communicate their purpose and activities without external influence 43, while the grant application statements allow a rich analysis into how ENGOs seek to enact climate justice through their activities. Our study offers three insights of value to applied and theoretical analyses of climate justice. First, the Australian context offers a unique opportunity to examine how ENGOs shape meanings and actions around climate justice in a colonial context situated in a highly contested political landscape with deep economic and social dependency on the continuation of the fossil fuel industry. The dominance of the fossil fuel sector in the country is being increasingly contested on environmental and social grounds 44. Given that this dynamic is playing out in other fossil fuel-dependent economies globally 45, our findings will provide insight into how ENGOs may respond to this change in other similar contexts.

Second, our study adds to a body of research examining ENGO climate justice claim-making in colonial contexts such as Australia. To the authors’ knowledge, no studies have expressly examined climate justice frames in Australian ENGO communication. Other research on climate justice in Oceania outside the ENGO context has found mixed results 36. For example, Godden and colleagues’ analysis of climate justice framing within Western Australia’s climate policy found that the policy neither incorporated elements of procedural nor distributive justice and paid little consideration to the multiple impacts of climate on various communities. They also highlighted the very small number of organisations working to mainstream understandings of climate justice.

Third, in this study, we heed researchers’ calls for a transformative approach to climate justice research by examining ‘vernacular’ understandings of the term alongside empirical analysis of justice claim-making by different groups 7, 17. We undertake this by examining the following research questions:

RQ1 : To what extent do ENGOs utilise the phrase ‘climate justice’ in their website communication?

RQ2 : How do ENGOs conceptualise climate justice?

RQ3 : How do ENGOs enact climate justice through their diagnostic, motivational and prognostic collective action frames?

Results

In the following sections, we first present findings on the extent to which climate justice language was found across the database of 619 Australian ENGO websites. We then combine this database with the 149 grant applications to examine ENGO conceptualisations of climate justice and collective action frames.

Prevalence of climate justice language across ENGO website text

Of the 619 websites, 220 occurrences of the phrase ‘climate justice’ were found across 64 (11%) ENGO websites (Table 1). Of these, 34 (51%) ENGOs used the phrase across 151 extracts (69%) without elaboration on its meaning. For example, Coffs Coast Climate Action used the term once on their website in the sentence ‘Make sure you've signed up to our email list to get the latest updates on this campaign and more action for climate justice!’ while Extinction Rebellion Australia included the term twice; once on a campaign page ‘Rebels joined with activists from a number of key climate groups to swarm the city for climate justice’, the other on a donation page: ‘Rebelling for climate justice costs money.’

Thirty ENGOs provided some explanation of their understanding of ‘climate justice’. Of these, the most frequent occurrence was found on Climate Justice Union’s website, which included 23 occurrences of the phrase (excluding mentions of their name). This group also listed extra resources available to better understand climate justice, as did Friends of the Earth Australia. Other ENGOs with frequent incorporation of the term climate justice alongside some or detailed description included 350.org (n = 19) and Greenpeace Australia Pacific (n = 18).

Dimensions of climate justice

Table 2 presents the dimensions of justice identified in the combined website and grant application dataset alongside the three most prevalent diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames within each dimension. The most common type of justice mentioned both on websites (n = 44) and grant application statements (n = 81) was distributive justice (n = 125). Statements most consistently noted that those most affected were least to blame: ‘Often those most harmed by climate disruption—younger generations, those in poor, climate vulnerable locations here and overseas, especially women, other species—are least responsible for creating the problem.’ (G11)

Procedural justice was the next most frequently mentioned dimension (n = 99), in which many statements called specifically for greater influence in decision-making by First Nations people: ‘Climate Change mitigation and strategies require genuine participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ (G43). Recognition and relational justice were mentioned 53 times and 45 times, closely followed by 43 mentions of intergenerational justice and 41 mentions of transformative justice. One example of transformative justice was conveyed by ‘Youth Verdict’, a recently established group using legal methods to challenge mining projects, which argued on their website that climate justice requires ‘First Nations people to have sovereign decision-making power over their traditional lands’ (W67). Nine statements did not provide information on any dimension of climate justice, while 74 statements mentioned one. Six groups mentioned all dimensions of justice in their website text: Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Friends of the Earth Australia, 350.org, Climate Justice Union, Environmental Justice Australia and Australian Student Environment Network (see Supplementary Table 2).

Collective action frames

Ninety-two statements identified one or more causes of climate injustice within the diagnostic framing theme. The most common cause identified across all justice dimensions, excluding intergenerational, was the fossil fuel sector (n = 57). One grant application stated: ‘This status quo includes governments and fossil fuel companies that are refusing to adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Targeting the support structure of governments and fossil fuel companies is a way of weakening their power and creating a more equal society’ (G22). Intergenerational justice statements most commonly noted politicians and governments as the cause (n = 11), followed by the fossil fuel sector (n = 9).

First Nations communities were consistently most frequently identified as those experiencing harm across all dimensions (n = 98). Fifty of the 125 statements conveying distributive justice identified the impacts on these communities, most commonly noting their minimal contribution yet disproportionate climate change impacts. For example, Environmental Justice Australia noted on their webpage: ‘The culture and traditional lifestyles of people living in Yarrabah are threatened by rising sea levels and devastation of the Great Barrier Reef and vital waterways. All this even though they are contributing the least to the intensifying climate crisis. This is why we need climate justice’. Frontline communities were also frequently mentioned (n = 60), as well as communities of lower class, wealth or level of development (n = 50). Youth, students and future generations were the second most commonly mentioned affected community in intergenerational justice statements (n = 18).

Turning to motivational framing, the most common rationale for taking action across distributive, procedural, recognition and relational dimensions was to help or empower people (n = 67). The opportunity to change structures or systems was the most common rationale found in 25 transformative justice statements, while intergenerational justice statements most frequently argued that there was a moral responsibility or obligation to do something (n = 13). For example, one grant application stated that ‘Emergency action is a moral requirement for the sake of future generations and global ecosystems’ (G26). Evidence of past success was the most commonly claimed resource in distributive (n = 36), procedural (n = 34), and relational (n = 15) justice statements and the second most claimed in intergenerational (n = 14) and transformative (n = 14) justice statements. A shared identity was most frequently mentioned in both transformative (n = 15) and intergenerational (n = 15) justice statements. As noted by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, ´We are one people, one ocean, on one journey!’ (W57).

ENGOs proposed a wide range of solutions to climate justice through their prognostic framing, which we coded as ‘issues’ that could simultaneously be resolved and ‘actions’ for supporters to participate in. Across all dimensions, the opportunity to alleviate negative economic impacts and inequality was the predominant issue connected to climate justice (n = 53). One grant application linked negative economic impacts to the need for a just transition: ‘A just transition recognises that people in coal and also in farming communities will face serious economic consequences if the transition to a zero emission society is poorly managed.’ (G146). Procedural justice statements most frequently noted issues around unfair power dynamics (n = 31), as did recognition (n = 16), relational (n = 10) and transformative (n = 17) justice statements. Intergenerational justice statements most commonly refer to the potential resolution of the interlinked issue of human, land and other rights (n = 14).

Most statements also conveyed one or more specific actions that could be undertaken to address climate injustice. The predominant action was building the movement and increasing movement participation (n = 73). For example, Friends of the Earth Australia listed this as one of their four key actions: ‘We will continue organising across the continent to build the grassroots climate action movement, and amplify the voices from the students' strike for climate, and communities on the frontlines’. Three other actions dominated all climate justice dimensions: collaboration and relationship building, which was most common across distributive (n = 23), recognition (n = 20), and relational (n = 20) dimensions, educating others (n = 64), and increasing or prioritising input from others (n = 51). Detailed results across all collective action frames are available in Supplementary Tables 3– 8, while example quotes are available in the codebook in the OSF.

Discussion

ENGOs play a critical role in driving grassroots mobilisation needed to address the environmental crisis 46. Through the use of collective action frames, they are able to convey specific meanings for concepts such as climate justice and mobilise supporters around them 30. Accordingly, our first research question examined the extent to which ENGOs incorporate the phrase ‘climate justice’ in their website communication and grant applications. We found that few Australian ENGOs incorporate climate justice language into their website text, and of those who do, the majority use the term only in passing with no further explanation. Thirty of the 619 websites (5%) include detailed explanations of their conceptualisation of climate justice, suggesting that climate justice may not yet be highly salient across the movement 47. ENGOs with transnational links provided more detailed explanations of climate justice dimensions than ENGOs without transnational links. This tendency may reflect the increasingly important consideration climate justice plays in international policy and transnational activism 5. Furthermore, the greater prevalence of climate justice language in ENGOs with transnational links suggests that these groups may play an important role in articulating and disseminating climate justice language across the movement and the wider community. This role may be particularly beneficial for the movement, given that smaller ENGOs may struggle to incorporate climate justice into their communications due to a lack of resources 35, 48. However, conceptualisations of climate justice developed by transnational ENGOs may omit local contextual factors which could negatively impact locally-appropriate, effective actions to facilitate climate justice 1, 49. For example, our data indicate that ENGOs with transnational links primarily focused on impacts on frontline and Pacific communities, while groups without transnational connections mentioned fossil fuel-dependent Australian communities more frequently. Advocacy organisations grounded in local contexts with established connections may therefore be more successful at mobilising local constituencies on climate justice 3, 50.

Our second research question examined how ENGOs conceptualise climate justice, finding that ENGOs have predominantly developed distributive and procedural conceptualisations of climate justice. Statements conveying relational, recognition and intergenerational dimensions of climate justice commonly highlighted the need for cooperative behaviour to resolve climate injustice and acknowledged the intersecting nature of climate injustice impacts, particularly the negative effects on unborn future humans. This finding supports research noting that ENGOs play an important role in calling for solutions that recognise and incorporate impacted communities into decision-making 8. However, transformative justice was the least mentioned dimension of justice by ENGOs in our dataset 51. This may reflect the comparatively little power ENGOs have in directly influencing political, social and economic structures

Our third research question explored how ENGOs link their climate justice conceptualisations to collective action frames. Our data demonstrate that ENGOs consistently align collective action frames to relevant climate justice dimensions, demonstrating a diversity of understandings and methods of enactment 52. For example, distributive justice was most commonly linked to solutions alleviating economic inequality, clean energy and disaster impacts, while intergenerational justice was most commonly linked to solutions calling for protection of human, land and other rights, the rebalancing of power, and improved health and wellbeing. Similar patterns were observed in prognostic framing, where collaboration and relationship-building actions were linked to distributive justice, education and awareness-raising activities were linked to recognition justice, and building the movement was linked to transformative, intergenerational and procedural justice. These findings suggest that ENGOs hold a sophisticated understanding of what climate justice means for them and how to operationalise it, despite the lack of conceptual clarity on their public-facing websites.

In general, studies on ENGO collective action framing suggest that ENGOs diagnose capitalist economies to blame, use the motivational frame of individual responsibility to encourage others to take action, and promote civil resistance actions as prognostic solutions 31, 37, 38. In contrast, we found that the fossil fuel sector was most commonly held to blame; action was encouraged primarily by highlighting the value of helping and empowering people, and collaborating and movement building were the commonly conveyed action responses. We consider each of these points below.

We found that the fossil fuel industry was diagnosed as the entity most accountable for climate injustice across all climate justice dimensions excluding intergenerational climate justice. This likely reflects extensive awareness in the Australian ENGO community around the role the fossil fuel industry has played in increasing greenhouse gas emissions while shaping and dominating discourses seeking to delay decarbonisation and the energy transition 53, 54. The Australian fossil fuel industry has experienced considerable success in propping up their commercial interests by framing decarbonisation as a direct personal and collective threat to entire communities fearing job losses and industry decline 44, 54. Supplemented by political narratives pitting activists and the environment against jobs 6, 53, these fears have also been observed in other fossil fuel-dependent communities 45. However, our data suggest that ENGOs are seeking to counter this process, with frontline communities frequently highlighted as those suffering from injustice and economic inequality, and a just transition from fossil fuels commonly highlighted as motivational frames. Thus, while ENGOs may lack sufficient political power to compel a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, our data suggests they may be playing an important role in removing the social license of the fossil fuel industry 55 while ensuring consideration of the social and economic impacts of a transition away from fossil fuels in Australia 49.

First Nations communities were most frequently diagnosed as affected populations across all dimensions of justice. While this suggests widespread awareness of the negative impacts of climate change on these communities, some researchers have expressed concern that identification of affected communities can reinforce stereotypes of victimhood and vulnerability, harking back to a type of colonial construct where solutions are problematised as actions being done ‘to’ these groups, rather than with or directed by them 15. However, our data demonstrate that many ENGOs argue that addressing climate injustice for this community will also help alleviate the effects of colonisation and socio-economic inequality, and enacting climate justice requires education, collaboration and increased input and leadership from affected communities. This suggests that concerns around the erasure of indigenous people’s struggles for self-determination via ENGO campaigns are not overtly happening in Australia 18, although the predominance of distributive justice within the dataset implies that solutions to climate justice remain firmly within the boundaries of a capitalist system 19. Indeed, the experience of First Nations people in calling for climate justice is unable to be ascertained in this dataset. However, to the authors’ knowledge, only three ENGOs in the dataset of 619 were First Nations-led (Seed, Original Power and Youth Verdict). This suggests limitations on the extent to which procedural and relational justice is currently enacted within the Australian climate movement itself.

Our data indicates there was a difference between motivational frames depending on the form of climate justice used; although they all extolled the benefits of helping and empowering others, intergenerational justice conceptualisations prioritised a moral obligation to take action, while transformative justice prioritised the opportunity to change structures and systems. By linking to resources such as past successes, shared identities and existing networks, our data suggest that ENGOs are framing injustices as collective struggles, using language aimed at bolstering individual agency and collective power 34. However, while these psychological processes are known to increase intentions to engage in collective action 56, the specific actions proposed by ENGOs were often ill-defined. Prognostic actions primarily included general instructions to build stronger relationships, increase the voices of marginalised groups and educate others, linking these actions to goals of resolving economic inequality and power imbalances. These actions are unlikely to achieve these goals. It may be that these actions and goals have been proposed to superficially assuage equity concerns while avoiding the need to target individual responsibility for inequity within our own communities 31. However, it may also reflect a deeper challenge in knowing the concrete actions and outcomes that climate justice actually entails 1. Indeed, across the dataset, there was little information provided as to what exact behaviours allyship, solidarity and increasing input from affected communities specifically entailed. As a result, it is unclear how these tactics will directly address the root causes of climate injustice identified in ENGO diagnostic framing.

We found no evidence that ENGOs predominantly link climate justice to direct action tactics and civil disobedience 9. Instead, incremental actions were more prevalent. These prioritised conventional tactics, such as educating others, increasing input from affected communities and engaging in allyship and solidarity actions; tactics all allowable within established political processes, unlike disruptive, radical protest 42, 47. Indeed, it may be that our findings reflect the particular context in which Australian ENGOs undertake their work, with increased criminalisation of disruptive climate protest 57, and a social setting in which some organisations believe that disruptive tactics are ineffective at generating change 58. This suggests that despite the urgency of the climate crisis, Australian ENGOs may not be currently seeking to achieve—or have sufficient power to implement—a transformative agenda that necessitates the use of disruptive civil resistance tactics 51.

Our findings suggest a number of opportunities for ENGOs to increase their supporters’ understanding of and willingness to take action on climate justice. The low prevalence of climate justice language on ENGO websites suggests that increased production and dissemination of the concept and associated collective action frames would be beneficial. Resources supplied by ENGOs such as Friends of the Earth Australia and Climate Justice Union could be adapted to include examples of diagnostic, motivational and prognostic collective action framing, ideally combined with experiments to test the effectiveness of different combinations in mobilising supporters. Connecting these organisations with ENGOs currently not engaging with climate justice could build a shared narrative on issues and solutions across the movement while leaving space for local conceptualisations and framings 51. ENGOs could also seek to develop a typology of climate justice-related tactics alongside examples or case studies of how different ENGOs in different geographic, economic and social contexts have specifically enacted a range of allyship and solidarity actions.

ENGOs could also consider modelling procedural climate justice, utilising their unique role in constructing meaning around climate justice, connecting communities and mobilising supporters. Models such as Extinction Rebellion’s Citizen’s Assemblies or deliberative mini publics could help ENGOs better incorporate community perspectives 59 when developing climate justice campaigns. While most ENGOs do not have the resources to undertake this work themselves 43, transnational and well-resourced ENGOs could support this work. They may also be in a stronger position to advance procedural justice by challenging the degree to which considerations of climate justice are reflected in agendas on the national stage 60. Furthermore, ENGOs could invest more in co-designing campaigns based on Indigenous and Pacific positions on what form procedures, relationships and compensation should take. Finally, ENGOs could continue to seek out information and opportunities to collaborate with groups working specifically with fossil fuel worker communities to deliver recognition and procedural justice as Australia transitions to a clean energy future.

While our datasets offer a unique insight into how ENGOs frame and enact climate justice, some limitations exist. In this study, we considered websites and grant texts, much of which may have been written by a single individual and more clearly reflected their personal perception rather than any formal organisational stance 47. Furthermore, our dataset is narrow and methodologically circumscribed. Although websites provide an unmediated opportunity for groups to convey their groups’ concerns, activities and goals 43, web scraping may miss text or websites not utilising standardised coding language. Moreover, ENGOs as a whole promote many thousands of actions 42; they may deliberately hide disruptive actions in order to avoid government crackdowns and criminalisation 57, nor link tactics specifically to the enactment of climate justice. Given that our analysis examined actions directly linked to selected websites and grant application texts, future research could therefore seek to examine additional communication platforms alongside capturing qualitative insights from ENGO organisers and volunteers regarding links between their communication and enactment of climate justice.

We also note that data may have been influenced by its purpose: for example, the majority of grant statements did not identify a cause of climate injustice, perhaps influenced by word count limitations. This finding could also reflect the primary purpose of the grant application, which was to obtain funding rather than directly mobilise supporters. Furthermore, grant applicants may have chosen to avoid anti-capitalist positions or align their projects to suit the perceived priorities of the granting organisation. Future research could seek to examine the website and grant data longitudinally and compare the two datasets to ascertain whether climate justice conceptualisations and framing differ according to the communication purpose in aggregate and over time. Our data also suggested that ENGOs with transnational ties incorporate more climate justice dimensions in their communications. Future research could examine whether these ENGOs mirror the climate justice framing of their global partners and whether differing patterns of collective action framing patterns reflect localised climate justice issues and impacts.

Despite these limitations, our findings suggest a number of fruitful avenues for future research. More successful collective action frames are those which seek to increase the resonance of communicators’ messages, leading to higher credibility and salience 30. Future research could test climate justice frame resonance through experiments in partnership with ENGO participants and observers. This could include analysis and testing of language from organisations with transnational links alongside messages developed more locally. Furthermore, our data suggest that a few key organisations play a critical role in sharing climate justice frames across the movement. Mapping and analysing key nodes and channels of information within these networks would help identify efficient channels for disseminating shared climate justice language and collective action frames across the movement. Finally, our data suggest that ENGOs may face challenges in selecting actions most likely to help address climate injustice. Identifying which are the most effective tactics that maximise supporter mobilisation while rapidly and fairly tackling climate justice remains contested 17. Identifying and assessing the potential impact of a diverse set of tactics related to different climate justice dimensions and researching any potential barriers that exist for their enactment would therefore be of substantial research and applied benefit.

In conclusion, our results address calls for empirical research on justice claim-making by diverse and understudied groups active in climate justice spheres, namely ENGOs across a national environmental movement 7, 17. Given their important role in mobilising grassroots action on climate change, this paper responds to the urgent need to better understand whether their work can assist in underpinning an effective agenda that prioritises climate justice. Our findings offer rich insights into ENGOs’ understanding of climate justice, an important area of understanding given the importance of ENGOs in shaping understanding of these concepts and channelling concern into community action. We found that ENGOs conceptualise and work across multiple dimensions of climate justice, most predominantly distributive and procedural. ENGOs consistently link climate injustice to the detrimental impacts of the fossil fuel industry, highlight the disproportional impacts on already marginalised communities and offer a multiplicity of avenues in which their supporters can work together to address its causes and alleviate its effects.

However, while ENGOs frequently highlight the need for transformative justice through addressing power imbalances and reducing the entrenched hold of the fossil fuel industry in Australian social, economic and political spheres, incremental change through actions such as movement building and increasing solidarity and allyship actions are the predominant tool they utilise to achieve these outcomes. Although our findings demonstrate that ENGOs are promoting a diverse set of largely incremental actions relevant to a wide range of communities, they may lack the resources to catalyse change on the scale required to achieve transformational justice. Despite this challenge, our data highlight the importance of a diverse and vibrant environmental movement ecosystem able to mobilise supporters around multiple dimensions of climate justice, using different identities and connecting with different communities. ENGOs seeking to build on this powerful foundation could consider collaborative efforts to develop and test the mobilisation effectiveness of different climate justice-related collective action frames while including more language around climate justice in their public-facing communication channels. In this way, ENGOs may be able to more fully harness their powerful role in mobilising action on climate change by linking conceptualisations of climate injustice to the daily concerns of those who suffer from it the most.

Methods

This research employed automated and manual qualitative thematic analysis. This approach facilitates a detailed exploration of how climate justice is understood across a national environmental movement, building on limited research exploring how different movement actors understand climate justice 31. Our qualitative analysis examined two datasets. The first dataset consisted of website text obtained from a pre-developed database of 619 Australian ENGOs which engage in some form of environmental advocacy, defined as collective behaviours which aim to influence or change laws, policies, practices, or attitudes 61. A detailed methodology for the development of this database is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) project: https://osf.io/xj342. Each group’s website headings and paragraph text were scraped using R Selenium package 62. The scraped text was compiled into a separate .txt file for each website, which was then scanned using an Excel macro for occurrences of the phrase ‘climate justice’. Each occurrence was checked by the first author, finding that sixty-eight of the 619 websites (11%) included the phrase ‘climate justice’.

The website text excerpts were then analysed in combination with a second dataset consisting of 149 statements about climate justice constructed for grant applications for a climate advocacy grant programme. The application statements were provided to the authors in de-identified form by the organisation managing the grant programme. These grants offered funding for organisations with an annual income under AU$2 million to implement climate advocacy projects in Australia. As very few Australian ENGOs have an annual income of over AU$250,000, the majority of Australian ENGOs are eligible to apply for the grant 43.

Six application rounds made by environmental groups between 2020 and 2022 were analysed in this paper (Supplementary Table 1). Applicants for the 2020 grants were asked to respond to the question “What does “climate justice” mean to you?” in 100 words. This question was amended for the following application rounds to “Tell us about the principles of climate justice within your organisation and/or project.” ENGOs could apply to several rounds, but neither the consistency of their answer across the different application rounds nor their organisational characteristics could be analysed due to data anonymity. Website and grant application data were collected between June and December 2022. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland [2020/HE000278 and 2022/HE002376].

Thematic analysis

We used a two-staged deductive inductive coding process 63, with a first round of deductive coding grouping text excerpts into pre-defined themes and a second stage of reflexive thematic analysis then added new inductive themes to explore patterns of meaning across the dataset 64, 65. Stage one of the process involved constructing a coding framework from deductively selected themes that aligned with climate justice frames found across climate justice research, namely distributive, procedural, recognition, intergenerational, relational and transformative justice dimensions. Themes from Benford and Snow’s collective action framing typology of diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames were also included 29.

After the set of deductive themes was constructed, website text and grant application data were compiled into a shared spreadsheet for the second stage of analysis. Following Braun and Clarkes’ reflexive thematic coding process, a preliminary analysis of 20 text excerpts was undertaken, during which the first author developed sub-themes within each overarching theme. These were then reviewed and amended by the second and third authors 66. Using this refined set of sub-themes, all authors coded an initial 20% of the data, following which a discussion identified redundant and new themes. At the conclusion of this theme development process, sub-themes were confirmed within four overarching themes: types of justice and the three collective action frames: diagnostic, motivational and prognostic (the codebook with indicative quotes is available on the OSF). The first author then completed all coding, which was then reviewed by the second and third authors. This process of multiple coders working independently ensured substantial coder reliability, with final coding results agreed upon via consensus

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

Selected datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available on the OSF link: https://osf.io/xj342. Other datasets may be available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Gulliver, R.E., Vachette, A. & Boddington, S. How Australian environmental non-governmental organisations frame and enact climate justice. npj Clim. Action 2, 18 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00049-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00049-2