Normative Governance Strategies in Civil Society Organizations' Communication on Facebook: Examining the Impact on Audience Engagement in Norway

• In Event: Nonprofit Governance, leadership and strategies

Abstract

Public support for policies addressing climate change is paramount for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mitigating its impacts, and promoting adaptive measures for communities and ecosystems. In this effort, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play a crucial role by raising awareness about the causes and consequences of climate change, advocating for climate policies, and mobilizing citizens to take action. CSOs have been instrumental in global efforts to combat climate change, using public relations tactics to raise awareness from their unique perspectives (Vu et al., 2020).
In this context, understanding the normative governance strategies (Raymond, Kelly, & Hennes, 2021) employed by CSOs on social media and their impact on audience engagement becomes crucial. Normative governance strategies encompass framing issues in alignment with societal norms and values, emphasizing the moral imperative for action, and connecting policies to deeply held beliefs. Investigating how CSOs leverage normative governance on social media can shed light on its effectiveness in shaping public attitudes, behaviors, and support for climate policies.
This empirical research aims to explore the normative governance strategies adopted by CSOs on social media platforms and evaluate their influence on audience engagement. By examining the content, values, norms and framing of CSOs' communication, we seek to understand how normative messaging resonates with different segments of the public. Additionally, we will investigate whether certain normative frames and types of norms are more effective in engaging audiences that may fostering policy change.
This study contributes to the growing body of literature on digital media, advocacy, and normative governance, providing insights into the evolving role of CSOs in the digital era. This research offers valuable implications for CSOs, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to enhance public support for climate policies and address the urgent challenges of climate change.
While normative-based governance, as conceptualized by Raymond et al. (2021), comprises four strategies—including the use of different framing of messages based on different norms and values appealing to different groups, the mobilization of descriptive and injunctive norms in communication, the enhancement of norm internalization to optimize external incentives for behavior change, and the use of epistemic norms in order to address challenges of misinformation and trust—this study will be concerned with three of these strategies namely, framing and use of descriptive, injunctive and epistemic norms.
The framing of information presented by CSOs has been shown to shape how people perceive and respond to it. This paper aims to examine how cognitive or topical framing, norms and moral foundational framing interact in predicting public engagement with CSOs' communication about climate change on Facebook. To this end, several computational methods—including topic modeling, semantic network analysis, automatic text processing based on a Moral Foundations dictionary, and text classification— are combined, using data gathered on Facebook. The results of the empirical analysis reveal that CSOs use different topical frames and moral foundations in order to influence policymakers and mobilize citizens. CSOs elicit most engagement on Facebook when they combine a “Climate mobilization” topical frame with the moral foundation of sanctity.

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Author

• Bernard Enjolras, Norwegian Institute for Social Research