Making climate governance actionable: a corpus-based analysis of institutionalizing climate change in tuna fisheries governance

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a central challenge for marine fisheries governance, yet how it becomes operational within institutional settings remains insufficiently understood. Leveraging the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) as an early institutional responder to climate change, this study examines how climate change is articulated and embedded in fisheries governance through a corpus-based analysis of all available annual meeting reports. Based on Field Theory and Natural Language Processing, we construct a climate-specific corpus and apply discourse, sentiment, and content-anchoring analyses to trace longitudinal shifts. We find that climate change does not enter WCPFC governance as a discrete policy input. Instead, it is gradually translated into an object of governance through processes of categorization, proceduralization, and institutional stabilization. Over time, the texts shift from a predominantly biophysical framing toward a more integrated configuration linking scientific evidence, institutional mechanisms, and distributional concerns, particularly those affecting Small Island Developing States. However, this institutionalization remains uneven: climate considerations are increasingly embedded in scientific and procedural domains, but their influence on allocation outcomes is still constrained by entrenched decision-making rules. These findings highlight the importance of institutional translation in shaping climate-responsive governance. They suggest that effective adaptation depends not only on improved knowledge, but also on the institutional conditions under which such knowledge can reshape distributive outcomes in regional and international ocean governance.