Case Study: Narrative Change in the Climate Justice Movement

Narrative change is increasingly recognized as a key social change strategy, whether the goal is to change social norms, behaviors, policies, institutions, or systems. Yet it can be hard to pin down what narrative is, how it changes, and what role it plays alongside other social change strategies. 

Sometimes the best way to learn how something works is to see it in practice. We’ve composed this case study to illustrate how framing, narrative, mindsets, and systems are connected in a process of intentional culture change—in this case, through the climate justice movement. 

Cultural Context

While the climate justice movement is connected to the broader climate change movement, its narrative is distinct in important ways. Historically, the broader climate movement’s narratives included recurring storylines of projected catastrophic futures (“gloom and doom”), the emergence of an incontrovertible scientific consensus, and the moral imperative of protecting children. 

While a precise starting point of the climate justice movement is debatable, a tangible turning point occurred in 2000, when the Rising Tide Network organized the first Climate Justice Summit. The purposeful timing—during the meeting of the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP6)—highlighted the injustice and paternalism of developed countries creating climate “solutions” for underdeveloped countries. 

In the United States, advocates began to more consistently connect social justice to climate change specifically in the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which devastated Black communities in New Orleans and led activists to argue that African Americans in particular were bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change vis-à-vis extreme weather events. Indigenous-led resistance was key to a decade-long effort (2011–2021) that successfully opposed Keystone XL, a proposed 1,400-mile-long pipeline that would run from the tar sands mines in Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico.

Framing Choices

Climate justice activists have made several strategic framing choices:

• A thematic narrative: Rather than focusing narrowly on individual events, the climate justice movement has consistently connected climate change to broader themes of power and injustice.
• A moral vision: Articulation of values that ask us to consider climate change not only as a scientific, economic, energy, or conservation issue but as a matter of social justice.
• Messengers: The climate justice movement broke away from the historical framing of youth, which invoked children as symbols of a moral call that “adults” should act. Instead, it has looked to young people as leaders and spokespeople with the power to speak on behalf of the community. Youth voices also reflect a break from scientists as messengers, a recurring characteristic of other climate narratives.
• Clear causal explanations: Climate justice advocates consistently point to root causes of climate injustice, including the heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel energy, the failure of government to rein in or resist the influence of the fossil fuel industry, and an imbalance of power between those who benefit from fossil fuel extraction and those who are harmed by it.
• Strategic use of data: Climate justice advocates often juxtapose data to contrast who is contributing to climate change with who is being affected by it, e.g., “Black communities make the smallest carbon footprint, yet they face the worst of environmental degradation.” This framing emphasizes that the impacts are not only uneven, but unfair—a technique that can motivate people to want change.

Narrative Elements

Coalitions like the Indigenous Climate Action Network and the National Black Environmental Justice Network have brought those framing choices together to form a narrative template that allows advocates and activists to draw from the form and features of an overarching narrative—and advance the narrative through storytelling about the effects that a reliance on fossil fuels has on Black and Indigenous communities. 

The climate justice movement leverages several formal features of narrative:

• Stories told from the point of view of Black and Indigenous communities who are resisting threats to health, wellbeing, or way of life posed by the extraction, use, and effects of fossil fuels for US energy needs.
• Recurring character roles: greedy and insensitive corporations; incompetent, indifferent, or compromised government officials; determined activists; ordinary community members inspired to join acts of resistance.^[1]
• A prototypical setting: a community of color—often an economically marginalized or physically remote one—where community members have been harmed or threatened, directly or indirectly, from the actions of fossil fuel companies.
• An expansive plot that not only involves an immediate climate-related plight of a single community, but also includes the history and reality of many forms of environmental racism, the motivations and tactics of environmental bad actors, and the structural changes needed to prevent other communities from being harmed in similar ways.
• A moral to the story: An evaluative judgment that society must make a “just transition” from fossil fuels to forms of energy that do not disrupt the climate system, and do so in a way that builds and restores Black and Indigenous communities’ wellbeing, wealth, and ways of life.

Mindset Shifts

Consistent narrative mobilization, primarily through earned media coverage of climate injustices, protests, and other direct actions, is leading to marked shifts in public thinking about who is responsible for climate change, who is affected by it, and what types of public response are appropriate. More than six in 10 Americans say large businesses and corporations and the energy industry are doing too little to address climate change.^[2] Half of all adults in the US think that climate change harms lower-income people more than it harms wealthier people.^[3] The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation “water protector” activists who opposed the Keystone XL Pipeline credit their narrative shift efforts with greater visibility for Native Americans and Indigenous perspectives and concerns in the US, going some way toward disrupting the persistent erasure of Native Americans from American public discourse.^[4]

Systems Change

While the climate justice movement’s ultimate goals are still unmet, it has undoubtedly achieved important wins in specific policies, practices, and resources. While the most visible specific win was, arguably, the successful effort to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, its success has been repeated in other settings, such as stopping a gas power plant in Kearny, New Jersey. Federal focus has homed in on the intersection of environmental issues and social justice: In 2022, the Justice Department created a new office solely dedicated to environmental justice, focusing on environmental laws and protections in communities bearing the brunt of environmental pollution and climate change. Funding—both philanthropic and public—for climate adaptation is increasingly targeted toward communities facing the greatest burden from climate disruption.^[5] The climate justice movement has sparked a notable increase in funding directed toward Native American-led organizations, particularly through initiatives like the American Rescue Plan, which allocated significant funds for American Indian and Alaska Native government programs, and major philanthropic donations from both major foundations and individuals.

Narrative Power and Resistance

As the climate justice movement achieves substantive change, it is also eliciting resistance. Conservative politicians and media outlets often criticize climate justice protests, portraying activists as unlawful and potentially violent.^[6] Moreover, the fossil fuel industry is using the same framing that has slowed and thwarted the larger climate action movement—emphasizing a false dilemma that asks us to choose between protecting the environment and growing the economy. 

Yet there are also signs that the justice narrative is ascendant. One indicator of narrative presence and power is that the narrative begins to be carried by storytellers not originally or intentionally involved in the narrative change effort. Among the many examples we could lift up, here’s a fun one: While the 2001 Disney movie Monsters, Inc. only hinted at energy as a site of struggle for justice, by 2011, the oil industry villains in Cars 2 and The Muppets were more specifically linked to fossil fuels. More recently, the show Stranger Things used “Upside Down” as a metaphor for contamination and ecological disruption, linking to ideas about Black communities are facing outsized environmental harms.

Philanthropy’s Role in This Narrative Change

Philanthropy has played an important role in advancing the climate justice narrative. Various funding strategies supported narrative presence, infrastructure, and power:

Supporting Narrative Presence

Philanthropy played a pivotal role in resourcing and supporting climate justice activists to share stories and ideas through multiple channels and formats, across multiple years.

• Funding media and communications initiatives: Foundations supported independent media outlets, journalists, news desks, and documentary filmmakers to tell the stories of communities experiencing and resisting climate injustice. According to Judith LeBlanc (Caddo Nation) of the Native Organizers Alliance: “We interrupted the narrative of who and what Indian people are in the 21st century.”
• Aligning with the movement’s narrative: Over time, philanthropic institutions once narrowly focused on conservation of flora, fauna, and natural habitats have expanded their framework and funding to include the social justice concerns of human communities affected by environmental degradation.

Supporting Narrative Infrastructure

• Organizational capacity building: Philanthropy helped strengthen the capacity of Black-led and Indigenous-led organizations working on climate justice issues by providing funding for staff, operations, coalition-building, and programming.
• Funding public perceptions research: Foundations have provided long-term support for ongoing research into public knowledge, attitudes, and opinions, equipping the movement with actionable insights to adjust narrative strategy and storytelling.
• Providing technical assistance: Philanthropy supported organizations with technical assistance and capacity building to enhance their communications and storytelling efforts.\

Looking Ahead

In 2025, the climate justice movement faces continued threats. Billions of dollars of grants to environmental justice organizations have been halted, the Department of Justice’s office of environmental justice has closed, and the future of the Environmental Protection Agency is uncertain. The precarity of the policy environment demonstrates the absolute necessity of sustained narrative and culture-change efforts. It’ll be a long road ahead to change the surround-sound we hear playing all around us on climate justice, but it’s essential to securing the lasting and sustained change we need.

Additional Resources

• This case study is an excerpt from the FrameWorks Institute’s report, Guiding Narrative Change: Considerations for the Philanthropic Field. The report includes a conceptual framework for the relationship between commonly used concepts in social change communications; lessons from a meta-analysis of research on narrative change; and resources to guide narrative change efforts, including sets of strategic questions, checklists, and more.
• In How Do Other Fields Think About Narrative? Lessons for Narrative Change Practitioners, we examine the narrative work of those less frequently studied or consulted by the activists, advocates, researchers, and strategists engaged in narrative change work. FrameWorks researchers conducted  interviews with experts from marketing and advertising, entertainment media/narrative arts, psychoanalysis, and technology (including its use in disinformation and dissemination of conspiracy theories). 
• The FrameWorks Institute’s Changing Narratives and Moving Mindsets initiative examined the relationship between narratives, mindsets, culture, and public policy and provided a playbook for building momentum toward meaningful social change.

End Notes

^[1]One example of “ordinary community members” joining or supporting direct actions: In November 2016, over a million people “checked in” to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation on Facebook to help protect activists protesting the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline after a viral post claimed this would shield protestors from police surveillance. (Source: Lee, R. (2023). Art, affect, and social media in the “No Dakota Access Pipeline” movement.

^[2]Theory, Culture & Society, 40(7–8), 179–192.)
Tyson, A., & Kennedy, B. (2023, October 25). How Americans view future harms from climate change in their community and around the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/10/25/how-americans-view-futureharms-from-climate-change-in-their-communityand-around-the-u-s/

^[3]Carman, J., Kioko, L. N., Ballew, M., Verner, M., Lu, D., Low, J., Rosenthal, S., Maibach, E., Kotcher, J., Amer, S., Marlon, J., and Leiserowitz, A. (2024, January 17). Support for climate justice across Global Warming’s Six Americas. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/support-for-climate-justiceacross-global-warmings-six-americas/

^[4]First Nations Development Institute and Echo Hawk Consulting. (2018, July). Reclaiming Native truth: Lessons learned from Standing Rock. https://www.firstnations.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Compressed-Standing-Rock-Report-Screen.pdf

^[5]The White House. (2021, August 9). Fact sheet: Biden administration announces nearly $5 billion in resilience funding to help communities prepare for extreme weather and climate-related disasters. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/08/09/fact-sheet-bidenadministration-announces-nearly-5-billion-inresilience-funding-to-help-communities-preparefor-extreme-weather-and-climate-related-disasters/

^[6]Cooper, E. (2023, August 7). National news’ scant coverage of climate protests largely overlooked the scientific urgency driving controversial climate actions. Media Matters for America. https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/nationalnews-scant-coverage-climate-protests-largelyoverlooked-scientific