Climate Regulation and Civil Society Activism

This paper investigates how public climate regulation shapes NGO activism against firms, providing new empirical evidence on the interaction between formal state action and civil society oversight. Leveraging novel monthly panel data on NGO campaigns across 75 countries from 2010 to 2022, and exploiting variation in the timing of climate regulation enactment, we find that public regulation significantly increases the likelihood of firm-targeted NGO activism. We explore two mechanisms underpinning this effect: a salience mechanism, whereby regulation elevates the visibility and urgency of climate issues; and a complementarity mechanism, through which regulation strengthens the institutional and informational environment enabling NGO monitoring. In contrast to the conventional view that state enforcement crowds out NGO activism, we find that it catalyzes civil society pressure, shaping corporate behavior through reputational and informal enforcement channels. These findings uncover a previously underexplored dynamic in climate governance and call for a rethinking of how the state and civil society interact to promote corporate accountability in environmental policy.