Climate Regulation and Civil Society Activism

Michela Limardi (), Jordan Loper and Alexandre Volle ()
Additional contact information
Michela Limardi: Université de Lille
Alexandre Volle: TREE - Transitions Energétiques et Environnementales - UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

CERDI Working papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper investigates how public climate regulation shapes NGO activism against firms, providing new empirical evidence on the interaction between formal state action and civil society oversight. Leveraging novel monthly panel data on NGO campaigns across 75 countries from 2010 to 2022, and exploiting variation in the timing of climate regulation enactment, we find that public regulation significantly increases the likelihood of firm-targeted NGO activism. We explore two mechanisms underpinning this effect: a salience mechanism, whereby regulation elevates the visibility and urgency of climate issues; and a complementarity mechanism, through which regulation strengthens the institutional and informational environment enabling NGO monitoring. In contrast to the conventional view that state enforcement crowds out NGO activism, we find that it catalyzes civil society pressure, shaping corporate behavior through reputational and informal enforcement channels. These findings uncover a previously underexplored dynamic in climate governance and call for a rethinking of how the state and civil society interact to promote corporate accountability in environmental policy.

Keywords: Civil Society; Climate Regulation; Environmental Governance; NGO activism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg and nep-soc
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05047276v3
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05047276v3/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Climate Regulation and Civil Society Activism (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cdiwps:hal-05047276

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERDI Working papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - CERDI - Université Clermont Auvergne ().