Social Science Field Guide | Climate Advocacy Lab

Welcome! This Field Guide is a tour through the most common frames and assumptions that underlie climate advocacy campaigns today—and what the latest social science research says about these frames and assumptions.

Researchers have written extensively about how and why people respond to the issue of climate change, especially in recent years. This research can help climate advocates be more effective in our outreach, but there’s a lot to comb through—and the research is rapidly evolving. That’s where this Field Guide can help.

For example, many of us highlight extreme weather and other climate impacts in our engagement work, but what does social science research actually say about how people react to being told about extreme weather and other climate impacts?

In order to be most effective, we need to briefly pause, take stock of what we do, why we do it, and importantly, how it meshes with what the latest research suggests.

“We believe a better understanding of what social science says about the underlying frames and assumptions behind climate engagement campaigns will lead to smarter and more agile campaign design.“

We also believe that underlying our best work are assumptions about human nature, psychology, and behavior that sometimes go unchecked—and may not even be accurate.

This Field Guide was co-authored by two experienced climate advocates—Carl Pope and Nathan Willcox—and two expert social scientists— Dr. Renee Lertzman and Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez. It was designed as a quick hit and review (not a how-to) for busy practitioners, and is intended to help build that better understanding. It isn't a guide for all climate campaigns; only those that have a significant public engagement component.

We have designed this resource as a guide through our most commonly used frames and the assumptions that underlie them, so that we can more easily track how we draw on a mixture of experience, training, anecdote and best practices to construct tactics and strategies. Our intention is not only to provide valuable insight, but to invite us to reflect on the ways we design our strategies and tactics in a rapidly changing ecological, political and social landscape.

How To Use This Guide

Read through this overview for context, especially our explanation of what we mean by Frames and Assumptions.
See the “Frames and Assumptions” page for a snapshot of what this Field Guide’s authors feel the research says about 17 common Assumptions underlying today’s climate campaigns.
Check out the individual Assumption pages for a more detailed analysis of what the research says about each of these Assumptions.
Check out the “Campaign Examples from the Field” page for examples of how some of these common Frames and Assumptions underlie recent climate campaigns.
Reflect on what Frames and Assumptions underlie your current campaigns, and “reality check” them against the information in this Field Guide.
Give us feedback! Be it an Assumption you think we should add, or a research paper whose findings change everything, let us know!

The goal of this Field Guide is to help you understand the behavioral and social science assumptions behind campaign work, and then use the latest research to shed light on these assumptions’ validity.

Assumptions Underlie Many of the Frames in Which We Work: How Accurate Are They?

Underlying each step in a engagement campaign are common assumptions—about human behavior, perception and what motivates people. These assumptions may or may not be conscious, yet they directly inform how we approach our work. They may be widely held and shared, i.e. “People need to understand the impacts of climate change,” or they may be idiosyncratic. Many concern psychological, social and cultural aspects of climate change issues and how best to communicate and engage people

We have identified some of the more commonly used communications frames employed in climate communications. Our intention is to set the stage for illustrating how the FRAMES we use—that is, our rhetorical techniques and strategies—are based on assumptions that often go unexamined.

To that end, we then examine 17 common behavioral and social sciences ASSUMPTIONS underlying climate engagement campaigns. These can be thought of as theories as to why people react the way they do to different types of engagement around climate change.

We then present a snapshot view of our take on ‘what research says’ about each of these assumptions, complete with a “Thumbs Up”-“Thumbs Down”-“Mixed Bag” grading system. Social sciences, like any discipline or field (including climate change advocacy), is marked by debates and energetic divergences. However, it is important to understand how the evolving field of climate change psychology and behavioral sciences can inform our work on the ground.

You Take it from Here

In this Field Guide, we are not going to tell you what to work on. We are not even going to tell you what to do. Those decisions belong in the domain of the political science, strategy and analysis. Rather, we invite you into a process of reflection and examination that we hope leads to creating your best work possible.

We want to make the unconscious assumptions that underlie our work more transparent—and to “reality test” based on what we currently know from relevant research and social sciences.

One last but critical note: our understandings of the human dimensions of climate change are in fact in an early stage, as the first papers published on the psychology of climate change were written only a few decades ago. Therefore what we are presenting is a snapshot of current thinking—with the recognition that the more social scientists and climate practitioners work together to uncover the behavioral, social and cultural dimensions of climate change, the more we can revise and improve our work.

So think of this Field Guide as a kind of map of the territory, with navigation and keys, to help us identify better ways to work. It offers insight into how we can become more effective, skilled and thoughtful about the climate outreach work we do.

The concept for a "Field Guide" evolved with the accompanying Skoll Global Threats Fund landscape report, Engaging with Climate Change: How We Think About Engagement. This longer report provides a deeper dive for those interested in the broader landscape, and as a launch into further innovation and integration of ways of thinking about engagement work. While the longer report covers the broader scope of engagement, and specifically the main ways we tend to 'group' our thinking about engagement (behavior change; values and beliefs; experience and emotions; and systems and design thinking), this Field Guide focuses on campaign support and design specifically.

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