Abstract
Sports clubs are under increasing pressure to take responsibility for more than offering sports activities. Reducing climate gas emissions can be such an area of responsibility, and in this study we ask how sport clubs address climate issues at the local level. The theoretical premise is that the meaning of climate change for a sport club does not arise automatically but requires interpretation: what we call framing. The study is based on 18 qualitative interviews with voluntary board leaders or board members, employed leaders or other key volunteers/employees in sport clubs within football, skiing, and motorcycle sports. We find four ideal types of sport clubs’ climate frames: deliberate climate action, incidental climate action, climate action incapability, and climate action unwillingness. Our contribution to the research field is first and foremost an empirically and theoretically informed understanding of how climate framing takes place in sport clubs.
Introduction
In this study, we investigate how Norwegian sport clubs address anthropogenic climate change, and there are five reasons we find this to be a timely question. First, and overall, climate change is a pressing issue for sport and all others (C3S/ECMWF and WMO, 2026; Orr, 2024). Second, climate change is best thought of as a wicked problem “caught in casual webs of interlinking variables” spanning sectors and national boundaries and challenging dichotomies such as public/private and individual/collective, in ways that severely “complicate both their diagnosis and prognosis” (Reinecke and Ansari, 2016: 299). On the one hand, then, climate change concerns sport clubs just like it concerns everyone. On the other hand, it is not necessarily clear to sport clubs, or anyone, exactly how climate change concerns them: what the problem is and what reasonable responses would be.
Third, whereas sports are increasingly expected to take on different kinds of social and political responsibilities, sport clubs are for various reasons often hesitant to spend resources on activities beyond the provision of sport (Fahlén et al., 2014; Nagel et al., 2020). This hesitance is reinforced by Norwegian sport clubs being voluntary organizations lacking clear-cut chains of command. People volunteer in sport clubs to do something they find worthwhile (i.e. sport) and cannot simply be told to do things beyond this (i.e. address climate change) (Hirschman, 1970; Knoke and Prensky, 1984). Fourth, and adding to the above, among the non-sport issues rivaling for sport clubs’ attention, climate change and other environmental issues remain among the lowest on the agenda, with public health, gender equality and social inclusion having a far stronger position (Seippel, 2024). Correspondingly, climate action at higher levels of Norwegian sport remains at a premature stage, with most sport federations lacking policies and most existing policies being vague and providing little direction (Sandvik and Seippel, 2023). Fifth, the Norwegian context is particularly interesting for the tension between ambitions for a lead role in international climate politics (Anker, 2018), a large fossil fuel industry, and considerable rates of climate denialism in the population (Krange et al., 2019; Norgaard, 2019). Sport clubs offer a context to understand how different perspectives on climate change play out and influence climate (in)action at a local, everyday level.
Climate change calls for action, but in the absence of both priority and an obvious, pre-articulated response, there is a clear sense in which climate measures in sport clubs must, to a large degree, emerge bottom-up, from the ambitions and actions of club leaders and members. Critical for sport clubs’ responses to climate change, then, is how the issue is articulated at the local level—in conversations between members, in board meetings, etc.—in ways that may or may not mobilize for collective action. Cultural framing theory makes it possible to study such articulations and points to three “core framing tasks” for successful mobilization (Benford and Snow, 2000: 615): a diagnosis identifying a problem and assigning blame or causality, a prognosis involving proposed solutions, and one or more motives for action drawing, for example, on arguments or sentiments of urgency and propriety. A key insight from cultural framing research is how frames that mobilize for action typically emerge from processes of alignment, where the issue in question is made to align with other and perhaps more salient issues and overarching values and beliefs in the organizational context (Caiani, 2023; Reinecke and Ansari, 2021; Snow et al., 1986)
Accordingly, we ask two questions in this article. First: how do leaders in sport clubs frame climate change as a problem for their club and their respective sports, how do they imagine solutions, and how do they articulate motives for action? Second, we seek to understand why certain frames come into being, particularly through processes of alignment: How do sport clubs align climate change with their core values and purposes (e.g. sport) and with other more salient issues in the club context (e.g. public health, gender equality, social inclusion)?
Our contribution to the research field is first and foremost an empirically informed theoretical model of how climate framing takes place in sport clubs, introducing four ideal types of frames. Empirically, with qualitative interviews with 18 club leaders, we move close to the local actors in sport clubs and explore how framing of climate change may play out at this level. Theoretically, we show how framing processes produce various constellations of diagnoses, prognoses and motives, and we discuss in detail how alignment matters for the emergence of frames.
We proceed with an outline of the case of Norwegian sport clubs, focusing on structural and political features, and specific characteristics of relevance for climate framing in the Norwegian context and for the three sports we focus on: football, skiing, and motorcycle sport. Our theoretical framework and previous research are then outlined and function abductively as deductive steppingstones for (inductive) empirical analyses. We then present data and methods before we describe our findings through four ideal types of sport clubs’ climate frames: deliberate climate action, incidental climate action, climate action incapability, and climate action unwillingness. In the end, we discuss the emergence of these four types, relying primarily on the concept of frame alignment, and indicate briefly how framing types and alignments also depend on individual and contextual factors. We conclude with reflections on how well-positioned sport clubs are for climate action as well as avenues for further research.
Context and previous research
The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) is an umbrella organization organizing club sports in Norway (Bergsgard and Rommetvedt, 2006; Seippel et al., 2015; Seippel and Skille, 2019). NIF consists of 55 national federations, 12 regional confederations, 328 sport councils, 8991 sport clubs, and 1.900.000 members (Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports, n.d.). The overall policy aim for Norwegian sport is “Sport for all.” This implies two priorities: (i) organizing sport activity and (ii) making this activity available for most people, regardless of age, gender, social class, minority status and disabilities.
Recently, NIF has articulated the implied issues such as gender equality and social inclusion as “sustainability issues” in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Holden and Linnerud, 2021: 12; Strittmatter et al., 2025). When NIF launched its sustainability strategy in 2022, climate change was highlighted alongside these issues as a distinct organizational focus, with NIF aiming to reduce 55% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 (Norges idrettsforbund, 2022). Nevertheless, previous research indicates that environmental issues remain low on the Norwegian sport policy agenda (Seippel, 2024) and that voluntary sport clubs in general hesitate to address issues beyond sport (Skille, 2011; Stenling and Fahlén, 2014). Correspondingly, climate change frames in the voluntary sport context are described as, first, lacking and, second, unsystematic and incoherent (Piller and Nagel, 2023; Piller and Nagel, 2025; Sandvik and Seippel, 2023).
Internationally, research on organizational responses to climate change has predominantly focused on North American sport or international megaevents such as the Olympic Games (Cury et al., 2023; Liebhart et al., 2026). Here, some lines of research, notably within the emerging field of sport ecology (McCullough et al., 2020a), have focused on organizational action, either top-down as governing bodies, leagues, and so on, launch strategies to reduce emissions (Kellison et al., 2018: 445–455; Lesjø and Gulbrandsen, 2017; Ross and Leopkey, 2017), or bottom-up, as local actors like teams opt for environmentally friendly venue designs or engage in pro-environmental messaging (Kellison and Hong, 2015; McCullough et al., 2020b).
In other lines of research, the emphasis has been on organizational inaction. McMillan, for example, have demonstrated how the Olympic games (McMillan, 2025) and the FIFA World Cup (McMillan, 2026) illustrate a kind of “fetishistic disavowal” of anthropogenic climate change, where climate change is framed through the lens of an “ideological fantasy […] in which ‘climate positivity’ is achievable through local changes that do not disrupt the commercial structure of the event” (p. 246).
We expect both action and inaction to be themes (and, indeed, outcomes) of framing processes in Norwegian sport clubs. For what types of actions and inactions to expect, and with what rationales, studies in the professional sport context offer only some guidance and need to be supplemented with a deeper understanding of two dimensions of our study's context: The specific sports in question and the wider Norwegian culture in which these sports are practiced.
As fully or partially dependent on snow, ski sports are, in a sense, under double pressure from climate change. Higher temperatures and winters with less snow constitute a problem that cuts to the heart of the sport (C3S/ECMWF and WMO, 2026; Orr, 2020). At the same time, the typical responses to this problem at the club level—more frequent and longer travel and more artificial snow production—contribute further to the problem (Schmidt and Stensland, 2025). What is more, skiing is widely practiced and a key part of Norwegian culture (Bomann-Larsen, 2005; Ellefsen, 2025) but faces dwindling economic funding and decreasing numbers of spectators and members, probably at least partly due to snow loss (Schmidt and Stensland, 2025). All in all, ski sports can be said, quite soberly, to suffer from an existential crisis due to climate change.
Motorcycle sport represents something of a contrast to skiing. Even if more frequent and heavier rain means more complicated and more expensive track preparation, motorcycle sport in Norway is to a far lesser extent affected by climate change. To a much greater extent, however, motorcycle sport affects the climate, not just with the carbon-intensive practice of transporting motorhomes and motorcycles on trailers to typically rural facilities but with emissions generated by the sport activity itself. Having a long history of adapting to more or less unpopular government policies on environmental issues such as noise, there is a sense in which climate policy (rather than climate change, as in skiing) represents a possible or perceived threat to motorcycle sport clubs. From the perspective of the Norwegian Motorsport Federation (NMF), a feasible strategy is electric vehicle adoption, but this strategy has been far from successful and somewhat controversial.
Football is the largest and most popular sport in Norway but has a less clear-cut climate profile than ski and motorcycle sport. It might be affected by both heat and floods, but, some particularly exposed facilities excepted, these threats are probably not experienced as particularly acute. Norwegian football's most pressing environmental challenge is the extensive use of rubber granules on artificial football fields, which is more frequently associated with microplastic pollution and chemical contamination than with climate change (Grynkiewicz-Bylina et al., 2022). These football fields will be phased out over the coming decades due to new EU regulations, involving considerable uncertainty for clubs. We suggest that the urgency of the rubber granules issue can be expected to influence climate framing in two directions: overshadowing or reinforcing. Beyond the focus on rubber granules, we assume that football largely reflects the views on climate change and climate action in the general population.
A note on the Norwegian context, then, is necessary. In terms of international climate politics, there is a tension between Norway's leadership ambitions and its role as a petroleum exporter (Anker, 2018; Rahman et al., 2026). Similar tension exists in views on climate change and climate policy in the general population. First, Norway (Rosendal, 2007) ranks relatively high on climate denial, with one study suggesting that as much as 39% of the general population do not believe in anthropogenic climate change (Krange et al., 2019). Climate denial should be understood as a spectrum and rarely involves outright rejection of science (Norgaard, 2019). The denial views typically found in Norwegian surveys read that climate change is real but that both its anthropogenic causes (Krange et al., 2019) and its severity or urgency (Nadeau et al., 2026) can be questioned. Ethnographic work shows how climate denial can take shape culturally and in social interactions, as a form of collective ignorance and apathy (Norgaard, 2011).
There is some evidence of polarization over time in climate concern (Aasen, 2017), and surveys documenting climate denial indeed reveal larger prevalences of concern (Krange et al., 2019; Nadeau et al., 2026). In terms of prognoses, there is considerable support for governmental climate policy as long as these are presented in general or vague terms (Aune et al., 2016; Tvinnereim et al., 2017). Support declines when suggested policies involve economic costs or changes in habits, and willingness to voluntarily change habits in, for instance, consumption or transport, is low (Aasen et al., 2024; Gregersen et al., 2026).
Theory
Our purpose is to describe and explain how leaders of Norwegian football-, ski-, and motorcycle clubs address the climate issue. To do so, we rely on cultural framing theory. At the basic level, we understand the concept of “frame” as a cognitive tool people use to make sense of situations and occurrences around them: more or less articulate answers to the question “what is going on here?” (Goffman, 1974: 21). Developed as a means to study how people make sense of concrete micro-interactions, the term has been imported to political mobilization theory and organizational theory where “framing” is understood as a process by which individuals and groups construct their understanding of social and political issues, generating what we call “issue frames” that eventually give meaning to their actions (or inactions) regarding an issue (Benford and Snow, 2000). Framing, in this sense, generates issue frames, understood as tools that help people interpret and make sense of open and contested issues such as climate change. They do so, among other strategies, by defining and labeling, by emphasizing some aspects of the issue while downplaying or ignoring others, and by linking the issue to other issues or values and beliefs in the given context (Benford and Snow, 2000).
Several authors view framing primarily as a deliberate and goal-oriented activity where “collective entrepreneurs” generate frames top-down in strategic efforts to motivate audiences to act in a certain way (Cornelissen and Werner, 2014; Giorgi, 2017). We, instead, rely on an interactionist understanding that views framing processes as continuously negotiated in interaction as people go about solving the problem of making sense of issues such as climate change in interaction with others. Thus, we ask how our interviewees articulate frames not strategically, in an effort to convince, but as their way of making sense of climate change as it relates to their sport and their club.
To describe the emergence of frames, we take departure in a key insight from the literature on framing in social movements, and assume that issue framing, at least theoretically, involves three key tasks: The definition of a certain issue as a problem and an attribution of blame (diagnostic framing), the proposal of strategies or solutions to address these problems (prognostic framing) and the provision of justification, rationales and incentives for action (motivational framing) (Benford and Snow, 2000; Snow et al., 1986). Ideally, then, an issue frame is the integration of these three elements into one meaningful whole.
In order to understand why specific frames come into being, we look for forms of “frame alignment” (Snow et al., 1986) understood as a discursive process through which actors construct or modify an issue frame by aligning it to a broader cultural stock of meaning (Snow and Benford, 1992). Specifically, we look for two forms of alignment. First, we are interested in whether interviewees “extend” their climate change frames to include other issues that are of considerable salience in their club and in their sport more generally (Snow et al., 1986: 473), such as finances or the social issues that generally rank higher on the sport political agenda (e.g. health, social inclusion, gender equality). Second, by “amplification,” we point to ways in which the construction of a frame draws not on other issues of concern but on salient values and beliefs in the club or sport contexts through “idealization, embellishment, clarification, or invigoration” (Benford and Snow, 2000: 624). For instance, we expect club leaders to engage in frame amplification as a means to align the clubs’ actions (or inactions) regarding climate change with, for instance, sport internal values such as competitiveness or visions of “sport for all.”
Research design and methods
Sampling
We study framing of climate issues in sport clubs in three different sports: football, skiing, and motorcycle sports. To obtain the perspectives, perceptions, and feelings from the sport club leaders about sport and climate, we have conducted 18 qualitative interviews—six for each sport—where the interviewees were voluntary board leaders or board members, employed leaders or other key volunteers/employees in sport clubs (Sparkes and Smith, 2014: 83). In order to identify typical and divergent climate framings within and between sports, we selected sports that differ with respect to vulnerability to climate change (skiing suffering from shorter and warmer winters), exposure to climate policy (motorcycle sport activities being reliant on combustion engines), non-climate environmental issues (football being marked by a growing concern with emissions of environmental toxins from rubber granulates on artificial football fields) as well as relevant organizational features as size, resources, and culture. All 18 clubs offer sport at grassroots, with most active members being children and youth. Some of the clubs can also be characterized as elite sport clubs. The clubs vary in size, from 50 members in the smallest to 6000 members in the largest.
The interviews were prepared as semi-structured, with themes based on previous climate research on the topic and the chosen theories for the study. The topics related to travel, clothes, equipment, and facilities came from research, while the aspects of diagnosis, prognosis, and motives were based on the core framing tasks within cultural framing theory. Questions were phrased to make interviewees aware that we were not solely interested in their personal perceptions but also in how climate change, climate measures, and other relevant measures are talked about and dealt with in the club context. The interviews were conducted in Norwegian and transcribed verbatim with minor edits for clarity and readability (Lareau, 2021: 222). For this paper, citations from interviews are translated to English with the aim of preserving meaning.
Data analysis
The study is abductive (Timmermans and Tavory, 2022) in being based solidly in a theoretical framework of cultural framing theory and previous research about sport and climate change. This makes data analysis deductive and theory-driven (focused coding), at the same time as the purpose is to make observations (open coding) that deviate from or add to these expectations and interpret these insights theoretically. We are exploring our data to generate theoretical ideal types, and these come from thematic analyses (Braun and Clarke, 2023).
After the interviews were transcribed, they were sorted into MAXQDA for analysis. We started analysis by reading through all the interviews to familiarize ourselves with the data. From there, we proceeded in two stages. The first stage started out deductively from a theoretically informed set of codes (e.g. diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, motivational framing, alignment mechanisms) that in turn were split, inductively, into subcodes of different diagnoses, prognoses, and motives. From this, we developed new codes continuously and identified larger themes that became the basis for stage two, namely the construction of four ideal types of frames. The result is four ideal type descriptions of sport clubs’ way of framing the climate issue. An ideal type highlights what we consider significant characteristics of sport clubs’ ways of handling the climate issue but does not necessarily reflect specific clubs (Weber et al., 2017).
Having sketched these four types as consisting of different core characteristics, data were analyzed again for occurrences of these characteristics, in turn leading to some further refinement and specification of the types.
Limitations & methodological reflections
This study has some limitations, and the data collected may not be fulfilled. At the outset, we made a sample of sports and clubs expecting a certain diversity in the field. As our analyses of climate frames proceeded, however, the ideal-typical frames emanating from our analyses reflected a certain homogeneity across sports and clubs with respect to our research questions, and in the end, we chose to build on this homogeneity and develop a general theoretical typology rather than searching for sport-specific differences. Our decision to prioritize the breadth of sports has also come at the expense of geographical range. Since the sports clubs included in our sample are primarily in or near the largest cities in Norway, there are few clubs representing the more rural areas in Norway.
Ethical considerations
This project has been approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (Sikt). All the participants signed an informed consent form before the interviews. We wanted to ensure the participants’ confidentiality and anonymity, so that they can feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions freely. Therefore, we use pseudonyms for both the sport clubs and the participants.
Findings
We have studied how leaders of sport clubs within three sports—football, skiing, and motorcycle sports—frame climate change as an issue related to their respective sports. In this section, we present the main findings as four ideal types of issue frames. The types are constructed from the following variations in our data. First, interviewees’ diagnostic framing varied along two spectrums: how they talked about sport-specific climate problems (from awareness to non-awareness) and how they talked about climate problems more generally (again varying in terms of awareness). For prognostic framing, there was variation along a spectrum from talk about climate measures justified as responses to climate change, via talk about climate-relevant measures with other justifications, via no talk about climate measures, to explicit talk about not having or wanting climate measures. Lastly, for motives, we found variation between those motivated for climate measures by a wish to address climate change or by a wish to solve other congruent problems, and those not motivated for climate measures because of lack of resources or what we experienced as a sport-local variant of climate denial: climate tiredness, carelessness, or a sense of irrelevance to the purpose of a sport club.
To make sense of these variations and to look for some general patterns, we have constructed four ideal types: the deliberate climate action frame, the incidental climate action frame, the climate action incapability frame, and the climate action unwillingness frame (see Table 1). In the following, we will describe these four types in detail.
An overview of the sport clubs’ four ideal types of climate frames.
The deliberate climate action frame
The deliberate climate action frame is enacted when the leaders of sport clubs engage in concrete talk about climate action, signaling a desire to do something positive for the climate. The frame type is characterized by acknowledgement that anthropogenic climate change is real combined with awareness about both general and sport-specific aspects of the climate issue. When interviewees employ this frame, they typically state that they have an obligation, or even a desire, to reduce emissions—either on behalf of the club or as individuals. As such, they are close to the ideal type inherent in framing theory, where diagnoses, prognoses and motives intertwine in a meaningful whole.
In terms of prognostic framing, the deliberate climate action frame typically involved talk about climate measures such as smarter travel, more sustainable facilities, larger investments such as solar panels, or sport-specific measures such as increased use of electric motorcycles. This talk was realistic, in the sense that it referred to things the club had already done, things that the board had already discussed, or things that the interviewee expressed an actual desire to explore. Anna, the leader of a football club, for example, stated that “We are currently looking into putting solar panels on the roof here, with some adjacent battery solutions or similar, to reduce our footprint.”
The quote from Anna further illustrates how prognostic talk in this frame type is explicitly coupled with the motive of reducing climate gas emissions. Deliberate climate action involves climate measures that are taken primarily for the sake of the climate and not for other reasons. Another example is from the interview with Emma, the leader of a skiing club: Yes, (climate is the reason they carpool) we always write something like: Let's save the environment. Who is going to the same place? We don’t need to drive five cars – we can drive two. And we also have a minibus that we sometimes can borrow. And then we fill up the bus. I think it is important that sports and sport clubs contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is about at what arenas we have the opportunity to influence other people. And the advantage of sport clubs is that people are very positive about receiving lessons and knowledge from us. And if it is in connection with the sport we practice, I think it would be a huge advantage to do it in this arena, in addition to others.
The incidental climate action frame
The incidental climate action frame is employed when interviewees talk about measures that could be conceived as climate action but articulate motives for these measures that have little to nothing to do with climate change. This type is characterized by a more general understanding of what climate change is and typically does not involve a direct link between an understanding of the causes of climate change and the sport club's activities.
In terms of prognostic framing, the incidental climate action frame touches on many of the same measures as in the deliberate type. The main difference concerns motives. The following quote from the interview with Anna, the leader of a football club, illustrates this: We are recycling our children's football shirts for example. We have actually had that (policy) for quite a while. But I think it's really more about the social aspect of it rather than the environmental aspect. We have carpooling. It is organized with several children and players in the same car – that is the best thing. But it is not like we choose to do this because of the climate. You can start at the age of five, so some people might be afraid of noise and things like that. And the [electric] bikes we’ve chosen here are really easy, because they can actually adjust everything such as engine power and speed and everything like that on the type we’ve bought. So that you can actually make them not go forward. And then you can just adjust them. So that you can get them to go exactly as little or as much as you want. So, that's actually a part of the reason we bought them. They’re really easy to use for the young ones.
A large portion of the interviewees had characteristics that approximated this frame type. Often, the employment of this frame appeared, like in the previous quote, as a reflexive thought of how something that could be framed as a climate measure is not—at least not outside of the interview. Other times, the frame appeared more as a discursive strategy in the interviews, where interviewees searched for already implemented measures relevant for the topic of conversation: climate change.
The climate action incapability frame
The climate action incapability frame type is characterized by either an explicit wish or a vaguer welcoming of the idea for the club to engage in climate action. The frame type does not involve realistic talk about climate measures but focuses on reasons not to develop such measures under present circumstances. The degree of awareness may vary within this type, from talk signaling strong knowledge about climate change in general and/or in relation to sport, to talk signaling very little awareness.
In terms of diagnostic framing, a core characteristic of the incapability frame is that it involves problematizations of climate policy—or other environmental policies. In the following quote, Paul, the leader of a football club, talks about how his club had no choice in the adoption of a new type of artificial grass on their main arena (owned by the municipality): We just got a new football field that was made of cork. It's more sustainable than rubber granules. But that is not exactly what we wanted. But that has something to do with the useability. As of today, nothing beats rubber granules, unfortunately. Both in terms of play, durability, both in the summer and winter. So, the cork we have now gets very hard both in summer, but especially in the winter. It attracts water, and then it freezes, and then it gets hard. Just like that. But we’re not going to complain, we have a football field after all. But it's 100 percent the city's environmental agency's choice to choose that field. So we have no say. We can have an opinion, but that doesn’t help. They are governed through politics. And when this was planned, there was no discussion. We had no choice. Then we know that shortly after we got it, some new exceptions were made again. Because then they saw that they might have to go back and have some football fields with rubber.
The problematization of climate policy aligns with a wider focus on limitations, difficulties, and powerlessness in the day-to-day effort of running a sport club: what we term incapability. When employing the incapability frame, interviewees typically talk about stress and the feeling of “drowning” in obligations even to have the club's core operations running and indicate that just thinking about adding another matter to the agenda is overwhelming and simply unrealistic.
Correspondingly, a key characteristic of the type is talk about lack of resources, and about how challenging it is, given the club's financial situation and the fact that they have few or no employees to be able to do the work that is needed to even organize sport. The quote from Finn illustrates this: Sports are very much based on volunteerism, and with the few resources we manage to scrape together to provide an offer… it's demanding enough already… And it's difficult enough, just with the demands coming from politicians who don’t understand what they’re adopting in all sorts of ways. Motorsports facilities in Norway are often a in rural areas, and they may not have the world's best power supply. So having access to charge electric motorcycles at motorsports facilities is currently not available in many places. Or most places really.
The prevalence of sport clubs with these characteristics in our sample is also quite extensive, second only to the incidental climate action frame type. Its prevalence probably reflects the fact that many sport clubs, also in our sample, have few resources and a pressing need for prioritization.
The climate action unwillingness frame
Some club leaders say, explicitly, that they see no reason for their clubs to reduce their climate gas emissions. Hence, these interviewees are reluctant, or even critical of the idea, to engage in or talk realistically about climate action. These are the key characteristics of what we call the climate action unwillingness frame. It is important to note that we see no explicit denial of anthropogenic climate change in our interviews. Hence, there are other starting points for unwillingness than just denial. The climate action unwillingness frame type typically involves acknowledgment that anthropogenic climate change is real, and it may or may not involve concern, even strong concern, about the issue.
Instead, unwillingness in our interviews is typically rooted in the ideas that, first, the emissions of one's sport club are a negligible drip in the ocean as compared to other emission sources and, second, that the social achievements of one's club are worth the emissions. David, the leader of a motorcycle sports club, justifies: I think that there are many other things in the world that have much larger emissions than the little that we are doing. Both with… like cruise ships and various other large vehicles. They probably pollute more in one hour than we do in a whole year. So that's part of the reason why you can’t … well, there are many factors, but I think it will have to make up for it by the fact that the activities our sport club offers are important for those who may not fit in in other sports. We are initiating environmental processes without having knowledge. And as I said, the stupid thing about it is that it harms children and youth. I understand the environmental message, and we must work towards that, but don’t destroy children and youth in the process. Climate policy also affects us to a very high degree when we kind of have… they have made a decision now that they will abolish rubber granules before they are even close to finding a sufficient replacement. It is the experience that it is a decision made by people who do not understand the importance of football fields for having good football activity. So I sort of experience that climate policy affects us. We could be very environmentally friendly, but if it causes our players to get injured… Up here, there's an olive kernel football field. It gives players that weigh over 40-50 kilos backache, because it's too hard. I mean, you could almost play on pavement. Are we then going to continue to do that? How sustainable is it that people can’t go to work? What does the actual total account look like? In a way, that's what I often experience… in the last 10-15 years in environmental policy, there have been a lot of people who have done things… probably with good intentions, but there are very few who dare to come forward and say that this is the whole picture. So how environmentally friendly is it really? Is that whole line from start to finish accounted for in this? Is it super environmentally friendly here? And then, in a way, what happens down in China when we produce this, it like we don’t care about that, because it's a completely different place in the world.
Discussion and conclusion
In this article, we study how leaders in sport clubs frame climate change as an issue. Drawing on cultural framing theory, and based on central themes in our data material, we have constructed four ideal types of climate frames: deliberate, incidental, incapable, and unwilling.
In the introduction, we alluded to the relatively low priority and even avoidance of climate change and other environmental issues in sport as compared with sport's core purpose and other extra-sportive issues with a historically stronger focus (Seippel, 2024). To grasp the core of the framing processes, we have chosen to focus on local and frame intrinsic factors: what elements do the climate frames consist of? How are the framing elements aligned? In this concluding section, we will first discuss how climate types might relate to forms of alignment. Second, we will briefly address the relevance of a set of more framing contextual factors.
All four framing types are characterized by one or more forms of alignment. The deliberate climate action frame (type 1) and the climate action unwillingness frame (type 4) in particular amplify values in the club context, including visions about the clubs’ purposes and social roles. Interestingly, they do so in very different ways, pointing in opposite directions when it comes to climate action. In the deliberate climate action type, climate action is a means to amplify a vision of sport clubs ready to be important actors in their local communities, taking on wider social and political responsibilities. Interviewees draw upon this self-understanding to justify climate action and, vice versa, draw upon climate action to reinforce the same self-understanding.
For the climate action unwillingness type, a narrower vision of sport clubs as defined by and restricted to the core purpose of organizing sport is drawn together with a critical stance to climate action. Here, talk about not taking climate action works to reinforce an image of the sport club's core activities as being too valuable and too resource demanding to justify resource allocation to issues with uncertain and distant outcomes: a club will not risk social inclusion here and now to reduce emissions that may, or may not, contribute to halting anthropogenic climate change in the distant future.
As with amplification, frame extension is mobilized to justify both climate action (in the incidental climate action frame—type 2) and climate inaction (in the climate action incapability frame—type 3). Typically, interviewees first start talking about issues they are more used to talking about than climate change, such as cost reduction, and then, discursively, find ways to broaden these more salient issue frames to encompass climate action as a new and somewhat incidental issue. In other words, club leaders extend other issue frames, such as cost reduction frames, to include climate change both as a supplementary diagnosis and a supplementary motive whilst seldom requiring new prognoses: the solution remains the same. For instance, the economic costs and the climate gas emissions from travel may be different problems, and lowering participation fees or lowering emissions may be different motives, but reducing travel accomplishes both.
Often, in the case of frame type 2, our interviewees engage in this sort of extension by alluding to measures that are already implemented in the club. Interestingly, there is a micro-interactionist phenomenon at play as interviewees respond to our questions about (potential) climate measures and act to preserve the interaction order by way of frame extension. Frame extension, in short, allows them to talk about things they are comfortable with and even have something to show for. We do not know whether this intra-interview extension logic reflects how the club leaders may talk about climate change in interactions in the club outside of the interview. Instead, such extensions of other issues to also encompass climate change should probably be seen as much as a potential that might well shape framing processes of climate change in sport clubs.
The other way around, club leaders sometimes revert to frame extension to justify climate inaction. In this sort of extension work, the interviewers’ cue to have interviewees think and talk about climate change is integrated into the diagnostic framing of well-established issue frames. Where acquiring resources and recruiting volunteers is a well-known problem, for example, being asked to address climate change can be seen as part of this problem, as a way of putting pressure on the club to punch, metaphorically speaking, well above its weight. Similarly, climate inaction becomes part of a wider solution: to resist pressure to allocate scarce resources to extra-sportive concerns.
For how contextual factors might matter for these differences, one obvious explanation is resources, institutional and organizational capacities (Hall et al., 2003; Pfeffer and Salancik, 2003; Scott, 1995). Studies by Wicker and Breuer (2011), among others, have shown how clubs in voluntary sport systems are characterized by scarce resources, and that clubs’ ability to respond to different challenges largely depends on organizational capacities. This interpretation makes sense considering in which clubs the two types were enacted most frequently: types 1 and 2 in larger and more professionalized clubs; types 3 and 4 in smaller and less professionalized ones.
Another, albeit more speculative, explanation is that climate action is more easily aligned with a sport club's core values for a person carrying significant personal pro-environmental concern or having acquired habitual ways of speaking positively about climate action from other fields such as work. As such, a relevant question is how our findings correspond with research on climate concern and climate denial in a broader Norwegian context and beyond. Our typology captures the breadth from concern and willingness to act, on the one hand, to lack of concern and willingness to act on the other. More importantly, the study shows how these positions are articulated in interaction and come into play in a specific organizational setting.
Finally, we have focused on how frames tend to take (four) similar routes across sports. We do, of course, expect climate framing to vary with specific sport characteristics but did not have the place to go further into this issue here. Here are, however, some brief examples pointing towards future research.
For example, skiing is among the sports most directly affected by warm winters, and this could pave the way for deliberate climate frames in turn being more prone to amplification alignments. Motorsport represents a fossil culture often tending towards skeptical climate attitudes, probably with de-amplification alignment effects. Football has a dominant environmental problem—rubber granulate—only indirectly linked to climate change. This could make for incapable and/or unwilling climate framing depending on extension alignments to really relate to climate change.
The discussion thus far makes ground for a few points about how well-positioned Norwegian sport clubs are to take climate action. What could be asked of them, and what would it take for them to respond with meaningful action? The first and obvious point is that clubs vary greatly in size and resources, and that matters. For some, climate action is both conceivable and doable; for others, it is not. Second, sport-specific characteristics of sports and the way climate issues are relevant to them would influence their climate framing. Third, individual engagement or habitual ease with the topic of climate change matters. Climate action is more likely to occur in clubs where people with pro-environmental values or familiarity with climate action from other areas of life hold key positions.
Taken together, these arguments point to an avenue for further research. Whilst we have studied frames constructed in a research interview setting, we have come short of a full understanding of framings of climate change in sport clubs in at least one way. The key question here is how such processes take place in real-life settings, in actual interactions between board members or other key personnel in a club, in the context, for example, of the development of actual measures: their content and alignments. Future studies should, therefore, aim to address this issue through more naturalistic methods such as ethnography and participant observation, or with group rather than individual interviews. With an interactionist focus, such studies would make it possible to see how frames emerge in interaction, how they resonate and how they, eventually, work as the ideational building blocks of structuring processes that couple ideas with knowledge, networks, and resources to facilitate action.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable contribution to this article from research partners in the project: Jill Purdy, University of Washington, Tacoma, as well as Josef Fahlen, University of Umeå/NSSS, Kari Steen-Johnsen, Institute for Social Research, and colleagues at the Child and Youth Sport Research Center at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences.
Ethics statement
Ethical approval for the collection of data was obtained from the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.
Consent to participate
Informed consent to participate was obtained in writing.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.