Negotiating a Mainstreaming Spectrum: Climate Change Response and Communication in the Carolinas

North and South Carolina have experienced considerable land-use change, urban sprawl and environmental management challenges within the past 30 years that have amplified and interacted with growing impacts from climate variability and change. However, with strong conservative majorities in the legislatures of both states, political tension around the issue of climate change has intensified, increasing the need for sensitive and deliberate climate change response strategies that mainstream action into salient areas of public concern. With data from online questionnaires and interviews with over 100 leaders within the Carolinas, this research explores a number of context-specific socio-ecological factors that influence climate change response activities and the mainstreaming process. Additionally, this study highlights how a key component of mainstreaming climate response action in the Carolinas involves the careful use of public communication frames. As such, mainstreamed climate change response within this region of the USA is often aligned publicly with other relevant areas of concern, not referenced or communicated as climate change response. Focusing on the process of mainstreaming provides a salient opportunity to bridge literatures around the concepts of mainstreaming and communication framing while analysing pathways by which climate change response activities are initiated, developed and enacted.