Climate regulation and civil society activism

This paper examines how climate public regulation shapes NGO activism against firms. We develop a private-politics framework where regulation alters campaign incentives through two opposing mechanisms: a cost-reducing channel lowering monitoring costs, and a value-diminishing channel where state compliance substitutes for private pressure. When the cost-reducing channel dominates, public regulation crowds in civil-society activism. Testing these predictions on a novel monthly panel of NGOs across 76 countries (2010–2023) within an event-study design, we show that executive regulations trigger a persistent increase in firm-targeted activism without pre-trend anticipation. Textual evidence shows that NGOs explicitly invoke regulatory benchmarks in their campaigns and that their use around enactment is not confined to campaigns already underway. Mobilization is strongest in weaker regulatory environments and concentrated among national NGOs targeting domestic firms. Together, these findings demonstrate that public regulation mobilizes civil society as an informal enforcement layer, extending climate governance beyond formal state action.