Speaking Climate into the World: ​Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Climatization​

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by Audrey Alejandro (London School of Economics), Benjamin Chemouni (DVLP- UCLouvain)

Political scientists are increasingly interested in the political dimensions of climate change, particularly how references to climate shape political processes, institutions, and events such as elections, public policy, and military strategy. In this article, we advance the concept of climatization to make sense of these dynamics. Drawing on scholarship from sociology and international relations, where the term has primarily been used to study global climate governance, we reconceptualize climatization to address its current limitations and render it more applicable across the broader field of political science. First, we define climatization as the process through which actors – for example, international organizations, government, social movements, media, communities of expertise, or individuals – use discourse to frame an object – for example, a policy, a natural phenomenon, an actor, a physical object– as related to anthropogenic climate change. Second, we provide a step-by-step framework to facilitate the operationalization of the concept. Third, we illustrate how to study climatization through a computational discourse analysis of a corpus of 78 agricultural policy documents in Rwanda spanning from 2004 to 2024. Overall, we introduce climatization as both a conceptual and methodological framework that enhances our understanding of how climate change discourse contributes to the shaping of political life.