A tale of two climate change meetings: Repertoires of protest across COP26 and COP28-related Instagram posts


Yasmin Koop-Monteiro, University of British Columbia

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the repertoires of protest that were spotlighted and promoted within Instagram during the United Nations 2021 and 2023 Climate Change Conferences (COP26 and COP28) held in Glasgow, Scotland and Expo City Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), respectively. The annual COP meetings represent “regularly scheduled critical events” that social movements can anticipate and mobilize around in their attempts to influence international climate change discourse and political deliberations (Stoddart et al. 2023). However, as COP meetings change locations annually and move across the world, they do not always offer the same political opportunities for social movement intervention. The substantially different social and political contexts of these two host sites — Glasgow and Dubai – provide an excellent opportunity for analysing the intersection of the climate movement’s repertoires of protest and the different political opportunity structures of different COP host sites. Exploring the most common forms of activism – and their links to climate discourse and imagery – that are spotlighted within COP-related Instagram posts, we reflect on (1) the unique political contexts of both climate change meetings, as well as (2) the potential influence that these unique contexts may have had on the repertoires of protest, discourse and imagery used through social media during COP26 and COP28. Theoretically, this paper draws on the social movements literature, particularly Political Process Theory which emphasizes three major factors as critical to social movement mobilization: (1) “organizational ‘readiness’” or the degree of organization in an aggrieved community, (2) “cognitive liberation” or the “collective assessment of…prospects for successful insurgency weighed against the risks involved in each action,” and (3) “political opportunities” or circumstances which make mobilization possible and more fruitful (McAdam 1982:34, 2013; Sun and Huang 2017). Here, special attention is given to “cognitive liberation” and “political opportunities” and their potential role in shaping the patterns of climate communication regarding COP26 and COP28 within Instagram. Data for this study were collected in two separate occasions in 2021 and 2023 during pre-COP, COP, and post-COP periods (on October 27–November 16, 2021 for COP26 and November 26–December 16, 2023 for COP28). For our analysis, we conducted a (1) qualitative visual and textual analysis, and (2) discourse network analysis of Instagram posts. We examined various types of (i) actors (e.g. NGOs/social movement organizations, government organizations, business organizations, media organizations), (ii) discourses (e.g. “climate crisis”), (iii) images (e.g. protest imagery), and (iv) repertoires of protest (e.g. “art-ivism”) being featured in each post. Our preliminary results show important differences between our COP26 and COP28 samples. For example, we find relatively fewer Instagram posts featuring protest imagery during COP28 in Dubai, UAE than during COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. In addition, we see relatively fewer Instagram posts promoting collective actions (e.g. marches, civil disobedience) or individual actions (e.g. going vegan, zero-waste lifestyles) to address climate change during COP28 than during COP26. Given the differing political contexts of each COP meeting’s host country — particularly the democratic versus authoritarian state status of Scotland versus UAE, and the significant restrictions on protest and free speech that exist in the UAE — these results are not surprising. Overall, these findings reveal how the selection of COP venues can be a key influence on the type of engagement from civil society — with more democratic host countries enabling the promotion and participation in a greater diversity of individual or collective actions, while non-democratic host countries can have a chilling effect on in social movement participation. We conclude by considering the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for understanding the interplay between social movement mobilization and the political opportunities offered by regularly scheduled critical events such as COP climate change meetings.

Non-presenting authors: Mark Shakespear, University of British Columbia; Mark C.J. Stoddart, Memorial University; David B. Tindall, University of British Columbia; Andrew K. Jorgenson, University of British Columbia

This paper will be presented at the following session: