Who is Studying What? An Anatomy of Climate Change Think Tanks in Europe

Note: This post's underlying data and an acronym key are available here. Network data files (nodes, edges, GDF, Gephi) are available by request by sending an email to bpmoore@gmail.com. This is a work in progress, feedback is greatly appreciated.

The International Center for Climate Governance has built a fascinating database and map of climate change think tanks on every continent. Each think tank is classified according to nine research fields (e.g., adaptation, policy and institutions, forestry and land use, etc.).

I was curious to see which research fields were most popular among climate think tanks in Europe, and how the organizations themselves related to one another. There are 141 European think tanks listed on the website, and each organization is linked to between two and six research fields. The most common research field is Policy & Institutions (a focus of 85% of the think tanks), and the least common is the Carbon Finance field (27%):

Among the think tanks, which ones work on the same research issues? To explore this question, I first converted the ICCG data into an affinity network which contains two types of nodes: think tanks and research fields. In this type of network, a think tank can only be connected to one or more research fields, not to other think tanks. The result is shown below, illustrating the central position that research fields such as Policy and Institutions play in the climate think tank idea ecosystem, as well as the fields such as sustainable cities which attract less attention:

My one issue with this affiliation graph is that it does not directly show when two think tanks are working on similar issues. I therefore created a second, projected graph, which removes the research field nodes and connects two think tanks directly if they share at least one research field in common:

Using Gephi, I identified three highly-connected communities within the overall think tank network (color coded green, blue, and yellow). However, as should be obvious, there is not a clear-cut separation between these communities. This is because almost all of the think tanks are connected to each other. In fact, this network has a very high density, .975 out of 1, meaning that in this case almost all of the possible connections between think tanks actually exist. In addition, the network has a very high average clustering coefficient (.98), which measures how likely it is that any three nodes are connected to each other.

Finally, for those interested in the networks of specific European regions, the image below highlights think tanks from six regions (the British Isles, German-speaking Countries, Mediterranean Countries, Nordic Countries, the Low Countries, and Eastern European Countries):    

Below are each of the six regional networks, removed from the overall graph to highlight their unique structures and connections.

United Kingdom and Ireland

Germany, Switzerland, & Austria

Italy, Spain, Portugal, & Greece

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, & Finland

Holland and Belgium

Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, & the Czech Republic