Faith-based Organisations and Climate Action at the United Nations

Faith-based organisations (FBOs) are an increasingly salient and active presence in climate action at the United Nations (UN) and the UN itself increasingly seeks out engagement with FBOs. There is a small, but growing body of research which addresses the role of FBOs in climate action at the UN which begins to address but leaves open important empirical and theoretical questions about the boundaries of UN climate action, the way different FBOs frame climate change, and the nature of religious-secular dynamics across UN, global, and local contexts.
In this thesis I begin with the broad question of what roles FBOs play in climate action at the UN. Entailed within this are three important themes: how FBOs frame climate change, how they navigate the global and local dimensions of climate action, and how religious and secular dynamics shape their engagement. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, conducted online and at COP26, and website analysis, I develop an overview of the UN-faith-climate space as a broad and complex network with multiple engagement points for FBOs. I find that FBOs play distinctive roles in the UN-faith-climate space through their ability to frame climate change in faith-based, though not necessarily confessional, ways and by acting as important global-local mediators between multiple spheres of climate action. However, these roles are complicated by issues of representation and of the religious and secular dynamics with which FBOs contend. I show how FBOs complicate simple religious-secular binaries in the UN-faith-climate space, yet at the same time do seek to carve out a distinctive faith-based voice. A recurring question is to what extent this voice can be representative, either of FBOs at the UN or of the local interests FBOs often aim to speak for. In response to these tensions, I bring debates on the postsecular to bear on the findings of this thesis as a new way of both framing FBOs’ presence in UN climate action and critiquing the norms upon which their engagement rests.