Keywords

7.1 Five Principles for Communicating Climate Change

Despite two decades of awareness raising and campaigning, and an ever-growing academic literature on the subject, public engagement remains in a deadlock: climate change is a scientific but not yet a social reality. In this book we have proposed a fresh approach to public engagement, based on five core principles:

7.1.1 Principle 1: Learn Lessons from Previous Campaigns, and be Prepared to Test Assumptions

In Chap. 2, we asked, ‘Is climate change different?’ On the one hand, there are good reasons to think that climate change poses a challenge like no other. But there are important lessons to be learned from public engagement and campaigning on other thorny social issues. In this chapter, we described the pitfalls of relying on a fear-based approach to public engagement, the unintended difficulties that have arisen from framing climate change so strongly as an ‘environmental’ issue, and the importance of peer-to-peer engagement and maintaining a sense of social momentum. We argued that there is a key role for radical activism. But the limited progress made on public engagement is in part a failure of energy and climate change campaigns in building a wide and inclusive movement. Climate change remains socially and culturally associated with only a narrow band of activists, and this poses a barrier to making rapid and radical societal progress on decarbonisation.

7.1.2 Principle 2: Public Engagement Should Start from the ‘values-up’ not from the ‘numbers-down’

However, the answer to this problem is not ‘more science’. As well as being pigeonholed as an environmental issue, climate change communication has suffered because it has been dominated by technocratic targets and the ‘big numbers’ of the policy debate. In Chap. 3, we argued for approaching climate change from the other end of the telescope, building public engagement ‘upwards’ from the communal values that people from across the political spectrum hold, rather than ‘downwards’ from facts and figures about climate risks. Values are the starting point for public engagement – connecting energy and climate change to the diverse range of interests and aspirations that different people hold and helping to move climate change from a scientific to a social reality.

7.1.3 Principle 3: Tell new Stories to Shift Climate Change from a Scientific to a Social Reality

In Chap. 4, we argued that the way messages about climate change are framed matters – not because there are ‘magic words’ that can somehow transform someone’s views, but because starting a conversation with people on terms they are comfortable with is the first step to building (and sustaining) their engagement. There are limits to the effectiveness of tweaking individual words and phrases to ‘reframe’ messages about climate change. But the limitations of this type of approach do not indicate that language is unimportant for public engagement with climate change. On the contrary, most attempts at linguistic reframing have not gone far enough, limiting themselves to the exchange of a small number of words in an otherwise fairly ‘standard’ message about climate change. We advocated for the importance of moving from simple alterations in message framing to a consideration of the role of narratives and stories as a way of building more meaningful engagement with energy and climate change, to be used in participatory public dialogues (not simply in slogans and advertising campaigns), as a vehicle for engaging with diverse public values.

7.1.4 Principle 4: Shift from ‘nudge’ to ‘think’ to Build Climate Citizenship

In the same way that tweaking individual words is likely to have a limited impact, we made the case in Chap. 5 that although it is possible to generate limited and piecemeal behavioural changes in low-carbon behaviours with conventional behaviour-change strategies, it is not possible to ‘sell’ climate change like a physical product, and no amount of ‘nudging’ can amount to a proportionate strategy for long-term public engagement. The act of talking about energy and climate change is radical and essential, but there is clearly a need to move from talking to ‘action’, and we argued that while there is no ‘one size fits all’ green lifestyle or prescription for a low-carbon life, individual behaviours (and how they relate to social identities and political choices) still matter.

The reason that (so far) widespread changes in significant energy-saving and low-carbon behaviours have not been forthcoming is because the wrong tools have been deployed for the wrong job. While social marketing strategies can produce tangible changes in compartmentalised and piecemeal behaviours, such an atomised approach (with no sense of how different behaviours relate to each other or how lifestyle changes fit with the bigger picture on energy and climate change) is simply not fit for building a proportionate response to climate change. The evidence suggests that if people have not taken on-board and internalised the reasons behind behavioural changes, they are unlikely to act in a consistently pro-environmental way. Until climate change means something more significant at the level of people’s values and social identity, public engagement will remain stunted and fragile – so participatory engagement, and a space for reflection on the reasons behind behaviours, is crucial.

7.1.5 Principle 5: Promote New Voices to Reach Beyond the Usual Suspects

Instead of chipping away at individual behaviours one by one, we argued in Chaps. 5 and 6 that the focus of campaigners’ attention should be on building a sense of climate citizenship and expanding the sense of social ownership around climate change. There are few influences more powerful than an individual’s social network, and the social norms that they are surrounded by, and public engagement campaigns should harness the power of these networks to catalyse new voices in the energy and climate change debate.

Because building a sense of climate citizenship and wider social ownership is key to breaking the communication deadlock on energy and climate change, then the absence of accurate perceptions about what others think and value is a major barrier to overcome. The silence around climate change is so pervasive that the act of spending time talking about it is a radical departure from the norm. There is enormous value in pursuing strategies like this, which are the opposite of the ‘nudge’ approach to public engagement. Getting people talking about climate change, taking on board the views of their peers, and updating their social misperceptions about others’ views are vitally important: catalysing and maintaining a vibrant public dialogue is an end in itself. But as we show in the final section of this book, there are many tangible measures that would demonstrate that ‘talking climate’ was working as a strategy for widening and deepening public engagement.

7.2 What If We Create a Better World That Not Enough People Wanted?

Faced with the complexity of improving communication and campaign strategies, there are those who argue we simply don’t have the time for it. In an article for Vox magazine (first referred to in Chap. 4) titled ‘Is it worth trying to reframe climate change? Probably not’,Footnote 1 the well-respected environmental journalist David Roberts disputed the value of spending time or energy on the social meaning of climate change:

…(I)n terms of any large-scale, well-funded, concerted effort to change the way people think and talk about climate change? Meh. It’s the kind of thing that forever appeals to funders, but it’s a huge undertaking with dubious chances of success at a fairly late stage in the game. Climate change is what it is. The thing to do is just keep plugging away at it.

Certainly, the clock is ticking, and no amount of clever wordsmithing can (on its own) keep fossil fuels in the ground or make international carbon targets a reality. But the idea that ‘climate change is what it is’ is perhaps the single biggest misconception among environmentalists and climate change activists. The challenge is very much not to simply keep plugging away at it. As years of heads being banged against brick walls can attest, climate change doesn’t communicate itself, and perceptions of energy technologies are driven by a wide range of factors that have little if anything to do with the technologies themselves. The challenge is to step back, take stock of the things that determine how people engage with energy and climate change – and the central importance of values, narratives, personal reflection, and participatory engagement – and approach the challenge of climate change from the opposite end.

Climate change will mean different things to different people, but the important thing is that it means something at all. And while we may not have time for endlessly fiddling about with language or visual communication while global temperatures progress apace, we also do not have time for climate and energy policies that cannot be sustained because they are not built on a solid foundation of public opinion. A well-known cartoon,Footnote 2 frequently circulated among climate communicators, satirises opposition to climate policies that seem unarguably a good idea. An exasperated professor, presenting to an audience at a climate summit, lists the many reasons (including energy independence, healthy children, clean air and water) for embracing the low-carbon transition, as an audience member asks, ‘What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?’

The cartoon unintentionally raises another issue: what constitutes a ‘better world’ is something that people have different views on. Cleaner air and water may be an uncontroversial social good, but other aspects of climate policies are, and will continue to be disputed. The response to the satirical question in the cartoon might go something along the lines of ‘What if we create climate policies that not enough people wanted, and then find we’re unable to sustain them?’

Precisely because the challenge of climate change is so urgent, and the scale of the transformation of the energy system required is so dramatic, we cannot afford to waste time on strategies for public engagement that are untested, misconceived, or simply unpopular. As a society, we must get from ‘A’ (where we currently are) to ‘B’ (a decarbonised society, and a less than 2 degrees rise in global average temperatures), and we must do it quickly. But too many campaigns start with the end point ‘B’ and try to persuade people that this is something they should agree with. The approach advocated in this book is different: using participatory engagement – climate conversations grounded in communal values – as a catalyst for developing stories that provide a pathway for a range of publics to move their version of ‘A’ to the carbon-constrained ‘B’ that we know we must achieve in the end.

None of this means that progress cannot be made or that there is not a right and a wrong direction to be headed in. As George Marshall argues in his book Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Marshall 2015), the notion that climate change is the ‘perfect storm’ uniquely capable of outwitting our psychological machinery or social and political systems is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Marshall argues that if the challenge of transforming our energy system in response to climate change is unusually complicated, it is because it is so multivalent (i.e. it is open to multiple meanings and interpretations). We project ourselves, our biases, and our expectations about the past, present, and future on to climate change and see solutions that fit with our perspective at the expense of others. This is why – to quote Mike Hulme’s book of the same title – we disagree about climate change (Hulme 2009). But Marshall argues that the ‘wickedness’ of climate change is also an opportunity if we approach it in the right way: it lends itself to an almost unlimited numbers of stories being told about how to respond to it.

In a sense, while we may not be ‘wired’ to deal with a problem like climate change, the evidence reviewed in this book suggests that we are ‘wired’ in other ways that offer more hope: communal values are not the exclusive preserve of one political ideology, and there are dozens of powerful, passionate perspectives that can be nurtured and promoted on climate change, if space is provided for them to develop.

Precisely because this seems to be a challenge like no other, and precisely because there is no meaningful point at which the problem of climate change is ‘solved’, ongoing debate and deliberation is crucial, and disagreement (in the short term) is not necessarily a problem to be stamped out but could instead provide the fertile ground for genuine solutions to emerge from. As Amanda Machin argues in her book Negotiating Climate Change, disagreement is not a ‘bug’ in the system that should be eradicated (Machin 2013). Disagreement and contentiousness is the natural state of affairs for most subjects where differences in perspectives are grounded in deeply rooted values. Our argument in this book is that disagreements are not inherently bad things, and that developing authentic, culturally credible narratives about climate change that reach beyond the green bubble unavoidably means articulating visions that do not cohere and may even conflict (but agree on the importance of the issue).

Machin’s analysis is important, because it challenges the dominant assumption underpinning many energy and climate change campaigns: that it is possible to ‘get beyond the politics’ and implement green solutions that somehow transcend political disagreement with a vision of the future that everyone endorses. Inevitably, this means being prepared for a ‘battle’ between competing ideas. Whatever else climate change will bring, it will not somehow smooth over differences in political ideologies, and there is no one single story that has monopoly on the route between here and a sustainable future. According to Machin:

What it means to combat climate change depends upon who you are, where you are from, and where you would like to go…if we want to improve the chances of climate change rising up the political agenda we cannot demand that people ‘see reason’. But we can acknowledge the environment in our perspectives and identifications and distinguish our identifications in distinct ways.

All of this means that the approach we advocate in this book can provide the best tools for starting a constructive conversation about energy and climate change, but it does not prescribe a fixed behavioural or energy-policy pathway. If we are serious about significantly expanding the social reality of climate change, then we have to accept that there is not one single green narrative that communicators are asking people to sign up to: communicators should instead attempt to talk about climate change in a way that engages a diversity of values and then use these values as building blocks for a variety of different energy and climate change stories. This is not an argument for removing politics from climate and energy campaigns, but it is an argument for not pegging public engagement to one particular political perspective or policy pathway.

Quite the opposite of being a ‘drag’ on otherwise streamlined climate policies, public engagement – conversations about energy and climate change – provides the momentum they require to have longevity and a defence against governments ‘back-tracking’ on their commitments. When the general population is actively engaged with climate policies and why they matter, moving away from existing commitments is made much more difficult. When citizens are not engaged, climate policies are much more vulnerable. Managing climate change is a project that will easily outlive the current contours of political opinion: it follows that building as broad-based and inclusive notion of what it means, why it matters, and what we should do about it is a top priority.

Next, we describe in detail our Narrative Workshop methodology as a tried-and-tested participatory model for building engagement with climate change. If applied at scale and through existing social networks, this type of approach would significantly widen and deepen public engagement. But how would we know it had worked? In the last part of this book, we offer a definition of what meaningful public engagement with climate change would look like (and some suggestions for how to measure it).

7.3 A Tried-and-Tested Model for Climate Conversations

Throughout this book we have argued for the importance of moving away from social marketing and nudge-style approaches, and towards participatory public engagement. Crucially, processes for public engagement should begin with people’s values, and the Climate Outreach Narrative Workshop methodology provides a model for just such an approach (Corner and Roberts 2014; Shaw and Corner 2016). Developed from well-established principles of participatory engagement, and first formally trialled in 2011/2012 in work conducted on behalf of the Welsh Government (Marshall and Darnton 2012; Nash et al. 2012), Narrative Workshops aim to unearth the values and principles on which different people base their views about the world and build a bridge – a meaningful storyline – from there to a proportionate societal response to climate change. We have now run dozens of these workshops, working with different partners (including the Scottish Government and leading NGOs such as WWF) and with different target audiences (including centre-right citizens, faith communities, social housing tenants, and young people).

Our ‘funnel’ design starts with discussion of participants’ values, concerns, and aspirations. We find this process typically leads to a recognition that there is a set of communal values held in common. The next step is to take the conclusions from this discussion and focus in on a more personal and localised interpretation of these general ideas: are these values common in the local community, and are they undergoing change? This conversation around change serves as a bridge into discussions about fears and hopes for the future. The conclusions emerging out of these conversations provide a ‘lens’ through which to discuss climate change and explore different language and narratives for public engagement.

The Narrative Workshop methodology relies on an informal approach to conversations, hence minimum use of slides and presentations. Instead we largely rely on participants’ own voices to build a narrative arc through the workshop. This is designed to be an inclusive and accessible approach, as we draw on the values and beliefs that participants hold in common. Based on feedback collected from participants, people find this process has a significant, and positive, impact on their level of engagement with and concern about climate change, as the conversation develops. It is an approach that begins with people, rather than a particular policy proposal or technological response. As the wider research discussed in previous chapters shows, people are more likely to engage positively to climate change messages when they are presented within narratives that validate their values and identity, and the participatory context permits the full value of values-based framing and language to be realised.

Recently, we designed and tested a model – based on our Narrative Workshop methodology – for holding ‘Climate Conversations’ at a national level in Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Government. In 2009, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed the most ambitious climate change legislation anywhere in the world.Footnote 3 The Scottish Government recognises that it faces tremendous challenges in delivering on these ambitions and that success is dependent on the support and involvement of the Scottish public. Generating an ongoing and self-sustaining national conversation about climate change in Scotland will be an essential step in building that support. This pioneering project is the first of its kind in the UK and possibly anywhere in the world.

What is novel about our work in Scotland is not the idea of talking about climate change in a group. Approaches such as ‘Carbon Conversations’,Footnote 4 ‘Carbon Ration Action Groups’, and ‘eco-teams’ have all shown promise as a way of producing durable pro-environmental behaviour change (Capstick and Lewis 2008; Nye and Burgess 2008). Typically, people find their structured yet social nature to be appealing, with participants identifying a sense of mutual learning and support as a key reason for making and maintaining changes in behaviour. However, with a handful of exceptions, these group-based methods of engagement have focused exclusively on reducing the individual carbon footprints of group members and so (almost by definition) have overwhelmingly attracted participants who are already to some extent committed to the issue. In contrast, our Narrative Workshops – and the Scottish Climate Conversations model – are aimed at people with no prior interest or engagement in climate change.

The full potential of values-based, participatory engagement would be realised if it were focused on pre-existing social networks, who have strong ties but do not necessarily have climate change or energy at their centre. This could mean face-to-face interaction (and our experience suggests that participatory engagement is most powerful in this format). But it is not feasible to hold in-person climate conversations with millions of people – and certainly not in the context of a rapidly changing climate when time is of the essence.

However, a rapid and radical intervention in the public discourse on climate change need not be limited to physical discussion. There are an abundance of widely used and cost-free online platforms on which millions of people interact on a daily basis. Of course, these platform have been used repeatedly for campaigning on climate change. But they have rarely been used for climate conversations. The potential reach of a dialogue initiated by (for example) a major sports team through its social media channels, or a forum like Mumsnet,Footnote 5 would be considerable. By diversifying the voices talking about climate change, the social reality of the subject would be fundamentally altered. And in this space, a truly proportionate response to climate change could flourish.

Resilient climate solutions (whether individual behavioural changes or energy policies) require robust, resilient public support. Without it, progress on climate change is a hostage to fortune, vulnerable to sudden shifts in the political winds, or external shocks such as an economic downturn. So public dialogues – climate conversations – are not a waste of valuable time. On the contrary, they are the glue that can hold the diverse elements of a proportionate societal response together. We do not gain time against the ticking climate clock by abandoning or avoiding public engagement; we lose it.

In this book, we have argued for a fresh approach to public engagement that could deliver the kind of broad-based (and more substantive) support required to make meaningful progress on climate change. But how would we know that this alternative type of approach had ‘worked’?

7.4 What Does Meaningful Public Engagement Mean in a Post-Paris World?

Without a doubt, debate and disagreement on its own is not enough to protect us from climate impacts or underpin the transition to a very different type of energy system. Conversations must have a basis in the reality of a changing climate. So it is crucial to have a basic framework within which climate conversations can operate.

The agreement reached in Paris at the UN negotiations in 2015 provides a framework with which to evaluate the progress of individual nations, because all countries have endorsed the principle of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial average temperatures. It tells us virtually nothing about how this abstract target should be achieved, but it offers a line in the sand, which other perspectives and positions can be anchored around. The challenge for the international community following the Paris agreement is not to set off on a UN-prescribed pathway to solve climate change, but to develop (at a national and regional level) plans, roadmaps, and policies which operate within the 2 degrees parameter.

Almost everything is still to be decided, and certainly the heavy lifting is ahead of us. But it does mean that the perfect time for opening a wide-reaching public dialogue on energy and climate change is now, and the fact that the UN’s climate change framework commits all member states to doing precisely this is a positive step in the right direction.Footnote 6 As national plans develop and are implemented, they must be grounded in a foundation of public engagement. And the ‘line in the sand’ provided by the Paris agreement for national legislators has a kind of domino effect on how individual nations can approach and gauge progress on public engagement.

Because there is now an international yardstick, national plans must add up to ‘no more than 2 degrees’. The challenge for engaging the public at a national level is to reach a point at which a solid majority of the voting population is not only supportive of, but actively positive towards, a national societal response that collectively meets (or ideally surpasses) national carbon targets. In this sense, there is a cascade effect from the Paris agreement, in that public engagement programmes can be tethered to something tangible and globally recognised. If, following five years of climate conversations and public engagement, the population of a given nation was no more supportive of a set of national policies that equated to their piece of the ‘2 degrees’ puzzle, then the programme would be a failure. But if the level of public engagement had widened, and deepened, and committed public support for a proportionate societal response had increased, the programme would be a success.

The journey that individuals and communities will take mirrors that of national legislators. In the same way that the UN did not prescribe national decarbonisation plans, there is no single, prescriptive lifestyle or energy policy that is implied by nations seeking to implement a proportionate societal response to climate change. But there is (for now) a non-negotiable limit, at a global level, which all nations have endorsed and agreed to play their part in achieving. And this means that campaigners and communicators can judge progress in public engagement by comparing public attitudes, behaviours, and preferences against national policies and carbon budgets. For the first time, there can a reasonably clear metric against which to gauge public opinion: are most people (in a given nation) on board with a way of life and a set of policy choices that will deliver or exceed national climate targets?

This is not a question that it would make sense to initiate a public conversation with. As we have argued in Chap. 3, ‘2 degrees’ (or any other abstract, technocratic framing) does not offer a useful public-facing way of starting a conversation. But researchers, communicators, and campaigners can use it as way of measuring progress in public engagement. The UK offers a good example in this regard, as it has well-defined targets for reducing carbon, which correspond (to some extent) to the ambition of the Paris agreement.

Researchers at Cardiff University took advantage of the relatively well-defined state of the UK climate targets, and used a tool which allows people to change the ‘levers’ of energy policy, in order to meet targets for 2050. Using a tool developed by the UK Government’s Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Cardiff researchers asked participants to explore the ‘My2050’Footnote 7 online tool which allows people to vary different aspects of the energy system using simple sliders, in order to meet the UK’s targets for reductions in carbon emissions. In a paper evaluating the approach they used, they argued that:

Although the tool sets a number of constraints on the choices people can make, the data provided valuable insights into people’s views and choices about a desirable future when considering multiple options and tradeoffs in the context of each other…Accordingly, and in contrast to offering scenarios constructed by experts, this gave participants the opportunity to develop their own scenarios reflecting their values and views on how energy systems should change. (Pidgeon et al. 2014)

While this example is obviously specific to the UK context, it gives a good sense of the type of structured exercise that can provide a focus for participatory engagement. If implemented at a national scale, on a regular basis, getting people talking about climate change, weighing up energy policy options, reflecting on what different scenarios and choices would mean for their lives and the things they value, would be a radical new approach to public engagement.

The focus need not stop at simply accepting existing climate targets; engaged citizens might well argue that they are inadequate (Shaw 2015). Indeed, a central claim in this book is that public engagement is not a means to an end, but an end in itself: the very act of promoting and maintaining a dynamic public dialogue will make climate policies more robust and more resilient. But if the new approach that we advocate to public engagement is to gain traction among campaigners and communicators, it will need to be synchronised with existing policy frameworks. The post-Paris national commitments are by no means perfect, but they are – currently – the best we have.

So what would meaningful progress (with individuals and communities shifting towards a position that reflects the realities of national and international carbon commitments) look like, in terms of attitudes, behaviours, and policy preferences? We argue that it would include (but not be limited to) the following three broad criteria.

7.4.1 1. Ownership and Identity

A key argument throughout this book has been the importance of expanding the social reality of climate change. We have suggested that by pursuing values-based strategies of participatory engagement, and using language that is explicitly designed to resonate with diverse public values, a much greater sense of social ownership and identity around climate change can be fostered.

Climate change is not only or even mostly about ‘the environment’. But the tropes and cultural contours of environmentalism have defined climate change in the public mind. Catalysing new voices means widening the social reality of climate change. The challenge is not to ‘turn’ the vast array of un-engaged social groups into environmentalists, but to build new senses of ownership among these disparate groups. Narratives – whether verbal or visual – are the key means by which to achieve this. Participatory public engagement is the channel through which they should be promoted and applied, with trusted values-congruent communicators acting as catalysts for others in their social network.

A wider sense of social ownership and identity around the climate change and energy debate, and a sense of climate citizenship would manifest in the following ways:

  • An increase in the relative importance of climate change compared to other social issues

  • More regular social interactions around climate change, breaking the social silence

  • Less negative views of environmentalists and environmentalism

  • Higher visibility of climate change in popular culture, and innovative creative and cultural responses to climate change

  • Prominent ‘unusual suspects’ talking about why climate change matters to them

7.4.2 2. Changes in Individual-Level Attitudes and Behaviours

We have argued that the focus of many early campaigns on ‘simple and painless’ behavioural actions was misplaced, that the challenges of behavioural ‘rebounds’ are significant, and that the elusive idea of ‘spillover’ between different pro-environmental behaviours is conditional on people engaging at a much deeper level than ‘nudges’ to their behaviour or via social marketing campaigns. However, there is clearly still an important role for individual attitudes and behaviours, albeit as part of a more complex system of influences that includes habitual, ingrained social practices, and a range of situational and structural constraints on individuals’ lives (Whitmarsh et al. 2011). If behaviour-change campaigns are built around engaging with communal values, then a range of behavioural changes are more likely to follow. Put simply, behavioural changes follow a process of building climate citizenship, not the other way around.

However, that doesn’t mean there is a single prescription for a ‘green lifestyle’ that everyone should follow. Behaviours are simply one representation of an underlying commitment to the importance of climate change (and a proportionate response to it). What constitutes a ‘proportionate response’ will mean different things for different people. For affluent citizens (who in any case tend to have the highest carbon footprints) there will be a range of significant behavioural actions that they can (and should) take, in order to live in a way that is consistent with a deeper level of engagement with climate change. They might, for example, be able to pay more for certain services, adjust their lifestyles relatively easily, and invest in pro-environmental decisions that have upfront costs. For individuals who are less well off (or constrained in other ways – for example by renting a property rather than owning one, or through living in a rural location), the range of actions that are feasible (and reasonable) to take might be quite different. In the same way that wealthy nations, historically responsible for a greater proportion of carbon emissions, have a ‘common but differentiated’ responsibility for cutting carbon at the international level, so different individuals will have different levels of capacity to change their lifestyles (Capstick et al. 2015b). However, a significant shift in public engagement would be likely to include the following aspects:

  • An acknowledgement (rather than dismissal) of the role of individual behaviours in responding to climate change, and a willingness to adopt lifestyle changes as part of societal response to climate change

  • Shifting social norms around pro-environmental behaviours; low-carbon lifestyles becoming aspirational and mainstream

  • A reduction in ‘rebound’ effects and an increase in ‘spillover’ (i.e. a consistency across different types of pro-environmental behaviour)

7.4.3 3. Policy Preferences

The third category in which progress in public engagement should be visible and measurable is in aggregate policy preferences. To take the UK as an example, there is generally strong support (in principle) for renewable energy technologies, as captured in national surveys (e.g., Parkhill et al. 2013). But there has been repeated opposition at a local level to the siting of renewable energy technologies. Progress on public engagement in terms of policy preferences would mean a solid and committed level of public support for a suite of changes in the energy system that correspond to national carbon targets. Committed public support would mean that it could not easily be blown around by the political winds (i.e. a change of government), and in fact, that wider and deeper engagement on energy and climate change would act as a ‘backstop’ against governments reneging on their existing or future commitments. Overcoming the so-called governance trap (Pidgeon 2012) on energy and climate change (where politicians won’t push ahead of where they perceive public opinion to be) means starting with the public and building a chorus of voices in support of a progressive energy policy, not just lobbying politicians.

Having a highly visible, national (and multi-partisan) narrative is crucial to join the dots between the different elements of the energy system, as well as how these structural level changes relate to individual actions and behaviours. Progress on policy preferences would be likely to include the following:

  • Widespread support across the political spectrum for changes in energy system (supply and demand) to meet carbon budgets

  • An increasing number of people who recognise the trade-offs in energy system choices

  • Strong individual visions of a low-carbon society taking a central place in the manifestos of all major political parties

  • A consistent and coherent narrative from a cross-party coalition that extends beyond the electoral cycle

These basic elements allow participatory public engagement to be anchored in some very tangible national and international policy goals. They are both an alternative set of metrics for climate change communication researchers, and potential targets for practitioners and campaigners to aim for. Creating a much closer calibration between the worlds of research and practice on climate change communication would significantly increase the chance of public engagement progressing.

7.5 Final Reflections: New Infrastructure for Talking Climate

One of the core ideas in this book is the importance of shifting climate change from a scientific to a social reality, so that committed public support for a proportionate societal response can take root across the political spectrum. A relentless focus on the science of climate change has swamped the climate and energy discourse, displacing other equally important dimensions of the issue: economics, culture, and psychological or social dynamics (Rowson and Corner 2015). And it has provided a stilted vocabulary with which to describe and discuss the issue that will define the twenty-first century. But the challenge is not to diminish the scientific foundations of the climate change and energy debate or bypass the trusted expertise of scientists. Instead, the science needs to be brought to life and to sit alongside the other crucial dimensions of the issue. And for this, new infrastructure for public engagement is required (Corner and Groves 2014; Corner and van Eck 2014).

We have advocated for conversations as the key channel by which public engagement can be widened and deepened. As we discussed in Chap. 2, emerging ideas around ‘deep canvassing’ have produced remarkable shifts in attitudes towards transgender issues in the US, prompted by reflective and considered doorstep interactions. Talking to people in this way about climate change would be possible, but even more powerful would be conversations within social networks, among people who already trust and respect each other.

But the right infrastructure does not yet exist to allow this to happen. Governments can sponsor or support public engagement activities but will always be viewed with a certain degree of suspicion by the electorate. Scientists certainly have a role to play, but they do not (for the most part) speak a language on energy and climate change that resonates beyond the ivory tower. Campaigners may have social and cultural currency, but they do not have scientific expertise and therefore may find themselves challenged in a different way.

New institutions, initiatives, and collaborations are required – scientists sitting alongside representatives of different social and cultural groups, environmental campaigners letting go of the ‘ownership’ of climate change, and working through existing social networks. The purpose of this new infrastructure would be to catalyse new conversations about climate change. These would not be designed to win an argument, but to allow people to express and discuss their concerns, fears, dreams, and hopes for the future, providing answers to the ultimate question posed by climate change, ‘how should we live?’ (Corner and Groves 2014; Rapley et al. 2014).

This is a question that everyone has a stake in. It will never be conclusively answered: it is an ongoing discussion and negotiation. But we can do a much better job of providing opportunities for people to take part in these discussions. Despite being dwarfed by the financial muscle of industrial lobbyists, the combined budgets of NGOs, civil society groups and members’ organisations with an interest in climate change at a global level are considerable (Dauvergne and Lebaron 2014). Governments pour many millions into physical infrastructure (including energy projects), but for the most part only pay lip service to public participation in climate policies.

From arranging town-hall meetings, to support and advice for existing social networks (online or in-person), to sponsoring debates and dialogue that explicitly reaches beyond the usual suspects and locates climate conversations somewhere entirely new, the logistical challenges would be considerable but by no means unachievable. And while there is certainly no time in a rapidly changing climate for dithering while temperatures rise, there is also no merit in advocating for climate policies that do not have broad-based social consent. An investment in the social infrastructure for climate conversations would produce a vibrant and dynamic public discourse on energy and climate change. And like all good investments, its value would become apparent over time, as individual campaigns, initiatives, and communication strategies found an increasingly attentive audience.

At the time of writing, the UN Paris agreement is being rapidly ratified by individual nations. There are increasingly positive signs that the global energy system is beginning to turn decisively away from fossil fuels and towards renewable technologies. These developments are welcome. But in other respects, there is little to celebrate, with extreme weather magnified by climate change on the rise, no recognition of the considerable impact of aviation and shipping in the Paris accord, and targets for the end of the century that imply either complete decarbonisation of existing systems and practices or the introduction of untested and unproven ‘negative emissions’ technologies. In key nations like the US and Australia, a poisonously polarised debate on climate change and energy choices persists.

But while it is possible to view the post-Paris landscape through an optimistic or pessimistic lens, it is unarguable that almost all of the heavy lifting on energy and climate change lies ahead of us. It is difficult to see how we can rise to this challenge without sustained and substantive public engagement. At present, though, there is a stifling social silence, with a muted majority sandwiched between narrow bands of activists at either end of the debate.

The evidence reviewed in this book offers tools, methods, and principles to break the social silence. New voices to catalyse engagement, new stories that resonate with diverse public values, and the cultivation of climate citizenship: these are the principles that can lift the energy and climate change discourse out of the margins and into the mainstream. It is time to start talking climate.