Reason and rhetoric in climate communication
Abstract
Rhetoric can facilitate movement beyond impasse on whether and how to confront climate change, enabling more effective public reasoning. Our evidence comes from a small deliberative group that contained climate change deniers. We show how in this setting bridging rhetoric (capable of reaching those who do not share the speaker’s perspective) managed to bring deniers and others into accepting that particular greenhouse gas mitigation measures were in the range of acceptable policy choices – even as deniers continued to dispute the existence of anthropogenic climate change. What we observed drives home the need for rhetorical bridges in broader public debates on climate change.
... Such mechanisms or platforms are essential to provide safe, open, respectful, and regenerative space and time for ENGOs' participants to acknowledge, recognise and discuss their concerns or differences. To do so, higher inclusiveness could help ENGOs to better sustain minority groups' participation and help to maintain greater public support, organisational sustainability, and policy deliberation outcomes (Bächtiger et al. 2018;Dryzek and Lo 2015;Perkins 2018). ...
... Moreover, confrontation of multiple perspectives, interests, and cultural meanings helps to correct individuals' biases and shifts in policy preference. She further highlights the use of narrative and storytelling to convey the history behind marginalised social and political groups, while other scholars also point out that rhetoric, such as analogy or parallel cases, is useful to bridge diverse worldviews (Dryzek and Lo 2015). ...
It is a perennial challenge for different political organisations, including environmental NGOs (ENGOs), to accommodate diverse social and political groups’ interests, opinions, and experiences. Without sufficient inclusiveness, ENGOs struggle to help create social and political change at a much faster pace, with climate action in Australia being a key example. In this regard, this paper argues that inclusiveness needs to encompass three dimensions, diversity, equity, and procedural justice, which are critical to managing internal tensions, disagreements, and conflicts. Evidence from two different ENGOs, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Extinction Rebellion Australia (XR Aus), shows that despite different types of organisational structures and resource availability, there are different challenges and opportunities for the two ENGOs in trying to establish and maintain higher inclusiveness. While diversity remains challenging to both groups, XR Aus’s self-organising and decentralisation have much easier access to decision-making and autonomous participation than ACF. However, it remains to be seen if XR Aus could harass its organising features to establish and maintain a higher level of procedural justice. These findings are relevant not only to issues in climate action problems but also to other collective action problems such as ethnics equality, domestic violence, income disparity, and gun control.
... (e.g. Curato et al. 2017;Dryzek & Lo 2015). ...
Many peacebuilding approaches strongly focus on vertical or “top-down” processes instigated by states and international actors. At the same time, theoretical critiques and new empirical research highlight the importance of horizontal or “bottom-up” processes involving cooperation at grassroots levels for sustainable peacebuilding measures. These questions are particularly pertinent for this Special Issue which addresses sustainable peacebuilding and explores alternative approaches to dysfunctional “eco-environmental” peacebuilding models, which, despite their promise in an age of climate crisis, rely heavily on international stakeholders and top-down approaches. In this article, we focus on general questions concerning the range of viable horizontal approaches, and their potential for mitigating conflicts, either in addition to or in replacement of vertical approaches. We focus particularly on the potential of deliberative practices for peacebuilding (i.e. horizontal exchanges involving open-minded, mutually respectful reason-giving that ideally allow deliberators to “put themselves in each other’s shoes”) and outline different ways that such exchanges can be institutionalised. On this basis, we discuss two very different cases (deliberative peacebuilding in Somaliland in the 1990s and ongoing deliberative initiatives in Ireland) where different forms of deliberative exchanges between conflicting parties, sometimes combined with vertical modes of peacebuilding, showed great promise. Taking these illustrative examples as a point of departure, we explore how deliberation functions in different contexts and discuss the contextual variables that are likely, more generally, to impact on success. We conclude by developing a tentative map of the conditions and implications of different deliberative peacebuilding strategies in diverse political contexts.
... Thus, together with technological advancement in mitigating the impact of climate change, resilience is also considered essential in withstanding this global problem. However, this requires advocates need to build trust (Cologna and Siegrist, 2020;Dryzek and Lo, 2015;Smith and Mayer, 2018), foster strong collaboration (Lozano, Barreiro-Gen and Zafar, 2021;Urban and Mitchell, 2011), and engage the public (Corner and Randall, 2011). It posits the complexity of climate change promotion. ...
... It has long been established that when deliberation is done right, it regularly changes the opinions of participants (Fishkin 2009;Himmelroos & Christensen, 2014). This has been called preference transformation (Dryzek & Lo, 2015). Through its principles of inclusiveness and unconstrained dialogue, public deliberation is expected to encourage people to understand the judgements of others and, most importantly, to reflect on and potentially transform or change their own assumptions and values (Blue & Dale, 2020). ...
Since its inception, public deliberation has been largely seen as an effective tool of inclusion and transformation within democratic politics. However, this article argues that public deliberation is not necessarily inclusive and transformative. These aspirations can only be achieved if certain conditions are met. The qualitative analyses drawn upon in this public deliberation study included virtual and face-to-face conversations between participants (N = 70) about opinions on eating together. The article examines factors that can impede food system transformation initiatives. This can be particularly problematic in low- and middle-income countries because corruptibility can reduce the stringency of food system transformation policy. This study was conducted with participants from the Dutch cities of Almere and Amsterdam. The article argues that public deliberation can be truly transformative when (1) it is institutionally sanctioned, and (2) participants in the deliberation are given more time to make their arguments and reconsider these arguments in light of what others have to say.
... Climate communication research has focused on different domains, such as online spaces (see Schäfer, 2012), including testing particular frames and messages (Whitmarsh & Lorenzoni, 2010). The results have indicated that bridging rhetoric can be fruitful, but that superficial frames are unable to cause fundamental change needed for an ecological transition (Dryzek & Lo, 2015). Even though these studies make important inroads into communicating with (far-)right climate change deniers, research on addressing far-right audiences and arguments or recognizing them through education is still missing. ...
... In the climate case, besides a common call for more education and improved communication -from prebunking to debunking misinformation and disinformation -studies point in different directions and the intentions behind counteracting measures vary widely, from science advocacy and enhancing climate literacy to supporting mitigation and opposing vested interests (Mendy & Karlsson, 2022). Among the strategies proposed for countering science denial, some researchers consider presenting emotional narratives (Rode et al., 2021) and using deliberative approaches and processes (Dryzek & Lo, 2015) as promising, whereas others instead recommend to frame messages in terms of security and economy (O'Sullivan & Emmelhainz, 2014), or to focus on describing co-benefits when advocating climate mitigation strategies (Bain et al., 2016;. Part of the answer is thus that the context in question matters, even though the jury is out on when a specific measure might work and how. ...
This article describes the phenomenon of science denialism with a focus on the denial of climate science. It is evident from much research that science denial causes serious problems in coping with environmental change in the Anthropocene. However, while the reasons and characteristics of denialism have been detailed, straightforward answers on how to counteract science denial are missing. The article still offers some ideas in this respect.
Mainstream science communication has struggled to drive sustainability changes. We experimented with arts-based methods in a workshop series that sought to co-create new methods and formats for sustainability science communication with communicators, artists, scientists, and policy-makers. Here, we describe how we used Hartmut Rosa’s notion of resonance to interrogate our experiences, prompted by the workshops and the artwork produced in them. We show how the elements of resonance: affection, emotion, transformation and uncontrollability, fundamentally reshaped the workshops in constructive ways that we could not have predicted. We conclude by drawing out three insights for science communication practice.
While climate change issues have serious impacts over objective reality, they have to be socially constructed for raising public awareness. The way of socially constructing climate change issues substantially determines the trajectory of climate policies and governance. Thus, this research is developed on the theoretical basis of social constructionism. Following ontological and epistemological discussions, this work focuses on climate change discourses and borrows key elements of discourse coalition approach. Empirically, it maps the climate discourses and discourse networks in the newspapers in China.
How should we deliberate with citizens who entertain post-truth beliefs in democratic societies? This is a central question for those interested in wielding the epistemic potential of democratic deliberation against post-truth. Yet, the strength of proposed deliberative solutions depends on the accuracy with which post-truth is diagnosed. Taking seriously the connection between epistemic diagnosis and deliberative remedy, this paper looks at the motivations provided by non-vaccinating parents for their beliefs and argues for an understanding of post-truth as misplaced distrust in testimony, as against a standard view of post-truth as indifference to fact. Second, the paper argues this new diagnosis of post-truth renders ineffective deliberative strategies aiming to harness the power of impersonal reason and accuracy, of the kind recently defended by Simone Chambers. Instead, combating post-truth as the paper defines it is effectively accomplished through employing bridging rhetoric.
This article explains the behaviour of communications that have been taking place in the context of climate change and how fruitful they have been so far. It states that important insights can be gained from better understanding the way climate change has been communicated to date and how this communication has been received and interpreted. This article reveals further that communication of climate change has been less effective than one might wish for several reasons. It offers more detailed diagnoses of those reasons and makes suggestions for potential remedies based on the extant literature. Furthermore, it articulates a role for communication that is broader than some communicators might assume. It also suggests that people in a democratic society, are best served by actively engaging with an issue, making their voices and values heard, and contributing to the formulation of societal responses.
Many recent planning decisions are premised upon the scientific consensus that climate change is real, such as planned retreat of coastal settlements from the sea. Not all local residents accept forced relocation and some hold a radical form of rights-based belief that is hostile to government intervention into private arenas. This ‘deontological libertarian’ belief is related to a sceptical view of climate change science. This paper demonstrates the existence of this attitudinal linkage, based on an Australian survey. Climate scepticism is associated with the tendency to see private property rights as a fundamental entitlement and irredeemable in the prospect of forced retreat, regardless of compensation. The sceptical view has defensible normative elements constructed upon the framework of inviolable rights also underpinning recognised environmental and development imperatives. Appealing to absolute rights generally may be an effective way to approach the sceptical public. Rights offer a generalisable framework in which they can see how their non-sceptical counterparts are similarly situated despite expressing a different policy preference. Although consensus is not guaranteed, communication can proceed more easily by making a common ontological terrain explicit.
‘Scepticism’ in public attitudes towards climate change is seen as a significant barrier to public engagement. In an experimental study, we measured participants’ scepticism about climate change before and after reading two newspaper editorials that made opposing claims about the reality and seriousness of climate change (designed to generate uncertainty). A well-established social psychological finding is that people with opposing attitudes often assimilate evidence in a way that is biased towards their existing attitudinal position, which may lead to attitude polarisation. We found that people who were less sceptical about climate change evaluated the convincingness and reliability of the editorials in a markedly different way to people who were more sceptical about climate change, demonstrating biased assimilation of the information. In both groups, attitudes towards climate change became significantly more sceptical after reading the editorials, but we observed no evidence of attitude polarisation—that is, the attitudes of these two groups did not diverge. The results are the first application of the well-established assimilation and polarisation paradigm to attitudes about climate change, with important implications for anticipating how uncertainty—in the form of conflicting information—may impact on public engagement with climate change.
Plural values contribute to multiple arrays of expressed preferences. Conventionally, preference convergence toward consensus among initially disagreeing decision makers is understood in terms of diminishing value differences. A cogent account of consensual decision that respects non-diminishing value plurality is lacking. Instead there is a theoretic expectation for categorical consistency between subjective values and expressed preferences. Valuing agents in social interaction are expected to indicate identical preference orderings only if they hold correspondingly identical categories of values. This expectation precludes meaningful conceptualization of preference convergence under divisive normative dispositions. An alternative framework is proposed and illustrated by results from a designed deliberative forum on Australia's climate change policy. Data were analyzed based on Q methodology. Results show that small-group deliberations enabled effective communication between distinctive subjective positions and broadened understandings between individuals. While a consensual decision gained progress, no identified value discourse diminished below a significant degree. Observed changes in values did not run parallel to the converging preferences, suggesting a decline in value-preference consistency. These changes nonetheless are amenable to the principle of value pluralism. An alternative rationality concept is needed to account for this moral ideal within economics.
An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action.
Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001.
In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming.
Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.
Humans have always used denial. When we are afraid, guilty, confused, or when something interferes with our self-image, we tend to deny it. Yet denial is a delusion. When it impacts on the health of oneself, or society, or the world it becomes a pathology. Climate change denial is such a case. Paradoxically, as the climate science has become more certain, denial about the issue has increased. The paradox lies in the denial. There is a denial industry funded by the fossil fuel companies that literally denies the science, and seeks to confuse the public. There is denial within governments, where spin-doctors use ‘weasel words’ to pretend they are taking action. However there is also denial within most of us, the citizenry. We let denial prosper and we resist the science. It also explains the social science behind denial. It contains a detailed examination of the principal climate change denial arguments, from attacks on the integrity of scientists, to impossible expectations of proof and certainty to the cherry picking of data. Climate change can be solved - but only when we cease to deny that it exists. This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus solve the climate crisis. It will engage scientists, university students, climate change activists as well as the general public seeking to roll back denial and act.
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an 'issue' or a 'threat', can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.
Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. An empirical study found no support for this position. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.
The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.