Climate Regulation and Civil Society Activism

This paper studies how public climate regulation shapes NGO activism against firms. We develop a simple private-politics framework in which regulation gives NGOs new grounds to scrutinize corporate behaviour and intensify their campaigns. We assemble a novel global monthly panel of firm-targeted NGO campaigns across 78 countries over the period 2010–2023 and combine it with detailed data on climate mitigation regulation. Our empirical strategy exploits the month-level timing of executive climate regulations as a source of high-frequency variation in regulatory exposure. Event-study estimates show no evidence of pre-trends and reveal a persistent increase in climate-related campaigning following regulatory adoption. We complement these findings with text-based evidence showing that NGO campaigns explicitly invoke regulatory frameworks, and with heterogeneity analyses indicating that the effect is stronger in weaker regulatory environments and among nationally focused NGOs. Together, these findings show that public regulation mobilizes civil society as an informal enforcement layer, extending climate governance beyond formal state action.