Disengaging citizens? Climate change communication and public

Irish Political Studies

ISSN: 0790-7184 (Print) 1743-9078 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fips20

Disengaging citizens? Climate change communication and public receptivity Emmet Fox & Henrike Rau To cite this article: Emmet Fox & Henrike Rau (2017): Disengaging citizens? Climate change communication and public receptivity, Irish Political Studies, DOI: 10.1080/07907184.2017.1301434 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2017.1301434

Published online: 13 Mar 2017.

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Date: 14 March 2017, At: 06:47

IRISH POLITICAL STUDIES, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2017.1301434

Disengaging citizens? Climate change communication and public receptivity Emmet Foxa and Henrike Raub a

Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK; bDepartment of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany ABSTRACT

The mainstreaming of climate change through processes of media communication and political advocacy carries with it an imagined public. Drawing on qualitative data from 11 focus groups and 19 life history interviews carried out in the Republic of Ireland1 in 2010, the paper reveals a significant mismatch between the perceived characteristics of this imagined audience, and the practices and experiences of a socially embedded Irish public. Moreover, we observe the emergence of restrictive forms of discourse around climate change that leave little room for connecting with the topic, thereby serving to delegitimise it as a matter of public interest. Given the necessity for climate action and decarbonisation efforts that reach across diverse social and cultural arenas, we see potential for a broadening of public debate in line with key principles of deliberative democracy, with a view to achieving a more open and inclusive politics of climate change. Although we recognise the limitations of mainstream deliberative democracy thinking, including its inherent rationalism, we believe that its explicit commitment to inclusiveness and transparency offers a viable alternative to current disengagement and exclusion of citizens from meaningful climate change debate and action. KEYWORDS Climate change; communication; public; deliberative democracy; Ireland

Introduction Underlying much of political discourse and of considerable importance to the nature of the political sphere are presumptions about the ‘public’ held by key political players. These often implicitly and unwittingly ‘imagined publics’ (Walker et al., 2010) are increasingly subject to consultative and participative measures aimed at supplementing representative politics. However, considerable discrepancies frequently exist between imagined publics and publics as they exist within the social and material conditions of everyday life – that is, ‘actual’ publics – contributing to a noticeable disconnect between politicians and a large part of the public that the former are expected to represent and CONTACT Emmet Fox [email protected] University, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK © 2017 Political Studies Association of Ireland

Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin

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serve.2 For example, this disconnect is discernible in environmental policymaking in Ireland (and elsewhere) where notions of rational, utility-maximising consumer-citizens dominate debates, including those in relation to climate change adaptation and mitigation (Rau et al., 2014). This article considers the role of imagined publics in how media communication and political advocacy of climate change in Ireland attempt to appeal to the public to connect with the issue. Focusing on print media and TV coverage, climate change was near absent before, and even during, the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. However, it gained prominence after the Irish government initiated measures to reduce Ireland’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including the publication of the first National Climate Change Strategy in 2000 (Coghlan, 2007). Since then, climate change has entered the mainstream, with surveys of Irish newspapers revealing a steady rise since 1997 in the proportion of articles that mention ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ (Wagner & Payne, 2015). Nevertheless, such mentions remain low compared to many other European countries (Fox & Rau, 2016). Also a dramatic postcrash drop in such coverage occurred from 2009 until recently (Wagner & Payne, 2015). Multiple influences shape climate change coverage in the Irish media, including international events such as IPCC reports and national concerns that reflect the country’s political and economic structures and prevailing values, institutions and social practices (Fox & Rau, 2016). In this article, we build on existing accounts of climate change coverage in Ireland to explicitly focus on the role of an imagined audience in guiding the public voice of those wishing to have their climate change message accepted or heard by citizens. We explore the nature of that imagined public and contrast it with how actual, socially embedded publics relate to media and political constructions of climate change. Despite some limitations arising from this dualistic distinction between imagined and actual public(s), we argue that it aptly demonstrates sharp contrasts between largely unchallenged, taken-for-granted views of the ‘public’ and its assumed passivity regarding climate change, and empirical evidence of the diversity of the public generated through social research. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge here that not all media articles are addressed to an imagined public – for example, some may be intended towards influencing government figures by obtaining mainstream media legitimacy for their ideas. Still most articles likely bear some sort of underlying appeal to imagined publics, even to an imagined public that is merely intrigued enough to read one article. With the media being frequently singled out as the prime information source, their influence is often overestimated. In contrast, more subtle forms in which aspects of climate change have penetrated the everyday are largely ignored. For example, sound social-scientific knowledge about how awareness of climate change translates into actual shifts in consumption

IRISH POLITICAL STUDIES

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practices remains patchy (Davies et al., 2014). Responding directly to these knowledge gaps, the qualitative work presented in this paper, featuring focus groups and life history interviews, focuses explicitly on the nuances of the public’s responses to climate change messages, in particular their everyday (discursive) practices. The following section portrays the multifaceted nature of the climate change issue in Ireland and its multiple possibilities for being publicly relevant, which provides a contrast to the narrowness of climate change communication detailed in this article. The empirical section expands the contrast further through reference to the actual publics of our research; the implications are then dealt with in the discussion.

Background: the multifaceted nature of Ireland’s relationship to climate change While Ireland’s national GHG emissions are comparatively small on a global scale, Ireland’s per capita rates for emissions are the third highest in the EU (Eurostat, 2016). Key sectors of the economy such as transportation and agriculture come under EU commitments to meeting GHG reductions of 20 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. Ireland must also increase renewables to a 16 per cent share of final energy consumption by 2020. Failure to meet these binding targets will lead to large fines. On top of these goals the 2015 Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act, while lacking specific emission targets and a definition of a ‘low carbon … economy’, aims towards low carbon transition (LCT) by 2050. It also establishes an expert advisory council, and an annual reporting framework for certain ministers on adaptation and mitigation progress. However, as the per capita figures suggest, deeper questions also exist that relate to global citizenship, class-related emission inequalities and social justice. Additionally, the 2015 Paris agreement, to keep below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts for below 1.5°C, has raised serious questions by some key economists and scientists that appear antagonistic to maintaining economic growth (Fox & Rau, 2016) These concerns at the very least legitimate public discussion of politically neglected options such as economic de-growth (Murphy & Kirby, 2013). Already climate change impacts on the public. A spate of extreme weather events such as storms and flooding over the last decade and their enormous cost implications have drawn into focus Ireland’s vulnerability to climate change. Many areas that have experienced flooding are now no longer insurable (Hickey, 2010) and many farming communities, already implicated by being part of the highest emitting sector that falls under Ireland’s binding EU targets, have experienced ongoing disruption to land use. However, coverage of climate change impacts in Ireland has focused on individual- and community-level

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stories (e.g. a rural household or town responding to flooding) and individual incidents (e.g. flooding of Cork in April 2016) while ‘big picture’ analyses of climate change impacts on Ireland as a whole remain scarce (Hickey, 2010; Fox & Rau, 2016). A National Climate Change Adaptation Framework, launched in 2012, called upon local authorities to include adaptation into their relevant policies and plans. However, local climate change governance has been weak and few local authorities have developed coherent local climate change strategies (McGloughlin & Sweeney, 2011), a problem that continues to date. Responding to this (perceived) inaction by local authorities, local grassroots activism has emerged in some places. For example, the Galway branch of the Transition Town movement recently launched A Vision for Galway 2030, a report which focused explicitly on climate change adaptation and mitigation measures (Transition Galway, 2016). Importantly in the context of this article, the document was based on the results of participatory visioning workshops that involved local politicians, activists, academics and citizens who were invited to construct a set of local responses to the global problem of climate-damaging (economic) development. While local-level action is very important for an overall response to climate change, its impact is likely to remain limited in the absence of large-scale infrastructural adjustments in areas such as energy, food production, and transport. In sum, Ireland’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change is slowly entering public debate and consciousness. However, there remains a serious lack of debate concerning its multifaceted ethical and social considerations and the complexity of (infra)structural conditions, which fundamentally shape the resource consumption patterns of individuals and households. This also raises serious questions about the current focus on changing individuals’ consumption behaviour, for example, through a carbon tax, which appears to remain largely ‘blind’ to these structural constraints (Rau et al., 2014). As will be shown in the remainder of this article, the dominance of an ‘individualising logic’ in climate change mitigation and adaptation policy in Ireland that places a large share of the burden on individuals and local communities is also reflected in mainstream media coverage, including issues surrounding actual and imagined audiences.

Imagined publics: concepts and evidence Imagined publics shape how experts deal with lay publics (Maranta et al., 2003) and how policymakers anticipate their reactions in forming policies. This imagining is partially subject to unwitting presumptions held about the public as has been demonstrated from presumptions shared by energy professionals and policy makers of the public and their attitudes to renewable energy (Walker et al., 2010). These imagined publics are prevalent in planning


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where objectors are pejoratively portrayed as NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), that is, self-interested, poorly informed and deviant. For example, Garavan (2007) reflects on the profoundly local nature of Irish environmentalism, which has led to claims of a ‘NIMBY’ focus on immediate issues and grievances and a failure to address structural issues. However, he argues that ‘local-level protest often implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, raises fundamental claims regarding the nature of modern society’ (ibid.: 846), which is aptly reflected by his study of the Corrib Gas dispute, one of the most significant cases of environmental protest in the history of the Irish state. Similarly, Rau’s (2008) culturally sensitive analysis of anti-road protests in Ireland shows how many of these extend beyond the immediate localised effects of a road construction project to cover concerns about issues of power, democracy, or the relationship between state and civil society. Importantly, these studies reveal stark discrepancies between how the public is imagined and portrayed by powerful political actors, including the media, and the diversity and complexity of the actual public. Imagined publics have also significant consequences for expert-citizen exchanges on the issue of climate change, thereby influencing both receptivity and public engagement. Nisbet (2011) highlights the growing distrust among scientists and campaigners of an imagined public whose understanding of climate change diverges from expert views. Efforts to close this gap often focus on popularising factual communication, reflecting a desire to ‘correct’ a public who is being misled by media misrepresentation and bias, ‘irrational’ beliefs and the misinformation of climate sceptics (ibid.). Key climate advocates in Ireland continue to communicate as though the public will be readily awoken to act once it has received the ‘correct’ information backed by the weight of scientific authority (Flaherty, 2015). This strong rationalist focus on addressing both information deficits and apparent misinformation seems particularly puzzling for two reasons. First, it ignores the growing pool of studies reporting a ‘gap’ between pro-environmental concerns and actions (Lavelle et al., 2015) . Second, and perhaps more importantly, such a view rarely recognises the inherently social nature of public knowledge formation and use, including the social functions of denial and (mis)information (Norgaard, 2011). A sufficient understanding of climate change requires just ‘two simple facts’: global warming is primarily caused by an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and that burning fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, is an important source of CO2 (ibid.). Yet some members of the public still ignore, avoid, confuse or deny this relatively simple information while others actively seek out and engage with it. This diversity in reactions to a relatively simple set of messages cautions against treating the public as a though they were individuals with homogenous interests, motivations and rationality.

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Cognitive-rationalist views of the public are not only evident in public life and politics but have also dominated the social-scientific investigation of environmental behaviours more generally, and public responses to climate change in particular. Much criticism has been directed at mainstream environmental psychology and economics for the use of individualising and universalising models of human behaviour that rest upon ideas of a socially decontextualised public (Fox, 2014: 21, 38–45). Consequently, mainstream social science is struggling to challenge the democratic deficit that exists in much climate change communication and politics, perhaps even adding to it by pigeonholing or ignoring the public’s role in negotiating the purposes of scientific research (Wynne, 2006: 71, 75). For example, Webb (2012) identifies the strong marginalisation of practical knowledge and related erosion of a sense of capacity and collective responsibility for a shared fate. This, in turn, supports the idea of the ‘self-governing individualized subject of neoliberalism’ (117), with obvious consequences for any policy sector requiring collective action. This is reflected in the proliferation in Ireland (and elsewhere) of policies that require voluntary alignment with supposed ‘self-interest’ (as opposed to strong regulatory tools and at-source interventions to make production processes less environmentally harmful). For example, the successful introduction in 2002 of a plastic bag levy was evidently underpinned by an imagined public as primarily guided by economic self-interest.3 Contrast this with the possibility of an outright ban of plastics bags, an alternative that reflects a very different view of the public (as well as being much more contentious and possibly politically damaging). Perhaps the clearest example of the imagined individualist public can be found behind the government-backed Power of One awareness campaign, which intended to reduce Ireland’s GHG emissions by encouraging individuals to lower energy use to save money (Diffney et al., 2013). With a potential 80 per cent Irish audience reach during its most intensive advertising period (2006–2008) the campaign generally avoided explicit reference to the issue of climate change and instead treated the public as rational-calculative consumers who modify their habits and practices primarily for monetary reasons. Thus it largely ignored the public’s capacity for moral concerns, citizenship and the common good, which is mirrored in the title of the campaign. So far the evidence suggests that while raising awareness, it had no lasting effect on energy consumption (ibid.). Interestingly, this imagined self-interested public also reinforces the framing of climate change by communicators as an economic or policy challenge solvable through current political and economic institutions using technological innovation and efficiency gains, which is in keeping with mainstream ecological modernisation thinking (Wagner & Payne, 2015). According to Wagner and Payne (2015), organisations involved in shaping public discourse around climate change (mitigation) reflect political, business, media


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and research elites, reinforcing the dominance of incremental mitigation efforts that do not fundamentally challenge the economic and societal status quo. This is clearly reflected in previous Governments’ 2010 and 2015 ambitious, growth-oriented agri-food strategies as set out in Food Harvest 2020 and Food Wise 2025, which go directly against the need for emission reductions in this area. Since the crash this increasingly coincides in media communication on LCT (which does not necessarily mention ‘climate change’) with uncritical support for ‘green’ technological innovation and ‘sustainability’ initiatives that primarily promote the benefits to the economy (McNally, 2015). Consequently, calls by the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas and environmental NGOs such as An Taisce for more radical post-carbon alternatives, including establishing ambitious CO2 reduction goals, have had only limited success. These pro-growth interests and the accompanying perceptions of a rigidly complacent public are generally reflected in the types of mitigation action advocated in public and media debates. The aforementioned Governmentled Power of One energy-saving campaign, for example, deliberately avoided proposals for radical changes to people’s lifestyle and habits. Instead it portrayed energy saving activities that easily fit into the daily routines of a middle-class family household (e.g. switching off unused appliances). Frequent references to supply-side technological solutions such as wind energy complement this incrementalist approach to changing demand, reflecting an imagined public that is immutable and unwilling to accept sacrifices to their individual self-interests, although this is hardly ever stated explicitly (Fox, 2014). Climate change mitigation coverage in the Irish media frequently focuses on international political decisions, including EU climate policy or recent COP negotiations, rather than on national- or local-level initiatives (Cullinane & Watson, 2014: 16; Wagner & Payne, 2015; Fox & Rau, 2016). Moreover, local newspapers coverage is miniscule (Fox, 2014: 143–4). This framing of climate change mitigation as the responsibility of political elites, especially with regard to agreement on binding targets, has also been dominant in media communication on LCT (McNally, 2015). This imbalance towards international political and scientific initiatives, political elites and expertise again reflects a lack of appreciation of the transformative and participative capacities of the public and implies an imagined public of passive recipients to broader bureaucratic and technological changes (ibid.). With little attention given to active citizen engagement, the importance of social and cultural aspects of the everyday in successful climate change mitigation remains largely under-appreciated, an omission that is mirrored in many other environmental debates (Edmondson & Rau, 2008).

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Methodology Primary data collection took place in 2010 and consisted of 11 focus groups and 19 life history interviews.4 To investigate public receptivity to climate change as it is situated within the Irish societal context, the research compared the statements of several participant groups from four Irish societal fields: (1) education (2) environmentalism (3) business and (4) agriculture. Each field has strong relevance to the issue of climate change in Ireland such as through knowledge provision, lobbying and high emissions. Two low-skilled groups were also recruited to cover a broader spectrum of society. To enhance the comparative scope of the research, and in recognition of the diversity of actual publics, it involved participants from both mainstream (e.g. teachers, academics) and alternative groups (e.g. ex-Steiner pupils, organic growers) (Table 1). In particular,

Table 1. Composition of interview and focus group participants. Field/ socioeconomic group

Focus groups (FG) (ntotal = 11)

Education

University academics (FG1) Secondary school teachers (FG2) Former Steiner School pupils (FG3) University students (FG4) Eco-villagers (FG5) Climate Camp members (FG6) Business men (FG7) Organic growers (FG8) Conventional farmers (FG9) Production operators (FG10) Community Employment scheme (CES) (FG11)

Environmentalism

Business Agriculture

Low-skilled workers

Number of participants

Age range

Gender (male/ female)

Life history interviews (LHI) (ntotal = 19)

Names of participants used in text

5

28–45

1/4

1 (LHI 1)

3

28–35

1/2

1 (LHI2)

5

18–33

1/4

2 (LHI3, 4)

4

18–22

2/2

2 (LHI5, 6)

7

35–65

5/2

1 (LHI7)

7

20–30

3/4

2 (LHI8, 9)

4

35–60

4/0

2 (LHI10, 11)

Fiachra

4

35–60

0/4

2 (LHI12, 13)

Ulrike, Mary

7

20–70

6/1

2 (LHI14, 15)

Noel

5

20–35

3/2

2 (LHI 16, 17)

Anna Tony

6

20–45

5/1

2 (LHI 18, 19)


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the two environmentalist groups – Eco-Villagers and Climate Camp members (a since disbanded group) – could be described as radical-transformativist, which manifests itself in their strong support for systemic lifestyle changes to achieve a low-carbon society. The sample featured five environmentally oriented groups and is therefore less representative of society as a whole. However, the aim is not representativeness but to access a level of actuality that goes beyond mere presumptions of how imagined publics relate to climate change. To further between-group comparability, all focus groups followed a similar structure based on a series of open-ended questions, eight vignettes (short scenarios describing individuals engaged in various climate change related activities) and two visual aids, which compared Ireland’s national and per capita emissions with other countries. These were complemented by two brief survey questionnaires that recorded information relating to participants’ socio-economic backgrounds and their engagement with the subject of climate change. Life history interviewees were recruited from the focus groups. The collected data was coded and subsequently used to identify how participants define themselves in relation to climate change and their carbon-related practices, their sense of (dis)empowerment in relation to it and how they experienced aspects of it as part of their everyday lives. The following section presents some of the most prominent patterns that emerged from our comparative analysis of the empirical data. All interviewees’ names have been changed to guarantee their anonymity.

Actual publics The broad diversity of the public in regard to their climate change receptivity and its close relationship with respondents’ social circumstances represents a key finding of this study, with respondents’ divergent professional and socioeconomic backgrounds emerging as a decisive factor. This confirms existing observations in the literature of the intrinsically social nature of interest and challenges homogenising notions of individual – especially economic – selfinterest that are a central characteristic of imagined publics (see Imagined Publics Section). The data also reveal how climate change receptivity is not solely media-driven but heavily dependent on how it has (not) penetrated the public’s everyday world. This clearly challenges rather uncritical ideas of powerful media influences, the weight of scientific arguments, and audience passivity linked to climate change communication. This is not to suggest that the media do not play an instrumental role in shaping climate change receptivity in Ireland but to alert the reader to the heavy dependence of the impact of such media messages on audiences’ social relations and circumstances.

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The emergence of diverse climate change publics from different social backgrounds Drawing on statements from across our pool of respondents, we discovered how connections to climate change are differentially formed through fields of interest, particularly those that relate to respondents’ occupation as well as (ir)regularities of their past and current class-based position within society. We also found marked inter-group differences concerning respondents’ perceptions of climate change and how it related to their lives that far outweighed intra-group ones indicating that similar social conditions encourage similar receptivity. These important dimensions of interest and understanding can only be overlooked by communication which continues to socially decontextualise its audience. Across the four fields we identified examples of where climate change had entered through, and was being framed, by field-specific characteristics. In the conventional farmers’ discussion, climate change was predominantly discussed through the experience of changing weather patterns and a defensive rhetoric against regulatory restrictions of land-use. One participant linked climate change to recent local flooding events, to which the others initially resounded in agreement. However, blame subsequently shifted in the direction of local authorities and their planning departments, a line of argument that had featured prominently in the media (RTE, 2009). Both life history participants from the conventional farmers’ group referred to deviant local weather patterns and how these now featured in daily discussions amongst farmers. In contrast, the most prominent and vocal focus group position, led by two brothers, linked climate change to a recurring invective against environmental farming regulations such as the Nitrates Directive and plastic recycling under the Farm Plastics Regulations. This strongly associated climate change with sacrifice, inconvenience and further possible restrictions. They viewed farmers meeting these restrictions as fulfilling their climate change responsibilities. Interestingly, the narrative adopted by most conventional farmers concurred with the more absolutist notions of private property rights, with regulation being seen as an unwanted infringement on these rights rather than a vehicle for ensuring fulfilment of basic social and ecological responsibilities that come with land ownership. The main opposition to that stance in the farmer’s group was the counterpoint narrative of stewardship offered by Noel: as farmers … we’re not allowed leave it to the future … you have to think of future generations, I mean if our grandparents didn’t think of us. (FG9)

Nonetheless, he also identified meeting farming restrictions as proof of commitment to combating climate change.


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Organic growers seeing organic farming as part of a solution of systemwide changes indicated a more harmonious relationship between their work and climate change mitigation. They also picked up on their connection to climate change by way of immediacy. Additionally, they recognised climate change impacts on their food production practices and output: Mary: […]all that rain we’ve had in summers in the last few years yeah I mean that impacts on what you can grow and what you can’t grow […]. (LHI13)

Organic growers’ moral and political position, along with concerns about food production impacts, largely defined their position on climate change throughout. This is demonstrated in their typical narrative of injustice in global food production: Ulrike: […] the other effect of it is Governments […] by promoting to use biofuel they actually cause more hunger in the world because suddenly there is no food produced where people were eating before in poor countries and now they produce biofuel; what goes into the tanks so there is this effect of full tanks and empty plates … and I think this is very serious. (FG8)

As was to be expected given their political and moral take on food production, organic growers were much more accommodating to the concept of climate change as a threat requiring urgent action. Field influences on the business participants also appeared to be strong with climate change mostly subjected to the rationale of cost-benefit-analysis, profit orientation and competition. Carbon tax and emission targets served to tie mitigation with an anti-libertarianism and inconvenience. National economic competitiveness delegitimised the state’s role in mitigating climate change: Fiachra: […] we need to be more productive and more cost effective in terms of delivering goods and services and ah you know you can’t do that if you’re paying a couple of hundred million for something that the Chinese haven’t agreed with. (FG7)

In fact, incentivisation and economic competitiveness discourses were the defining feature of the business focus group, being much more pronounced here than in any other group. The eco-modernist framing seemed to offer the highest potential for legitimating mitigation among these participants. Two participants had enquired into green technology investment and another suggested Ireland should pursue wind and wave energy opportunities. The cost-benefit-logic also featured strongly in the two life histories from the business group. Fiachra, one of the interviewees, deployed this logic to justify his own decarbonisation efforts, defending his purchase of a Prius hybrid car, or having rooftop photovoltaic cells installed, with reasons such as being a cheap family-sized automatic or potential savings that might emerge if rates5 were tied to the Building Energy Rating. At times Fiachra

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appeared to struggle with his logic of legitimacy admitting his solar energy savings would not cover costs. He also claimed to have apocalyptic fears concerning the future yet still he resisted all moral and environmentalist justifications. This contradiction perhaps reflects the (perceived) delegitimisation of environmental ‘idealism’ amongst cost-accounting and managerial professionals, which is evident when Fiachra facetiously refers to his concerns that his green purchases might single him out as a ‘green nut’ or ‘somebody who’s very passionately involved in green issues and associated themes like animal rights’ (LHI10). The business field rationale has the capacity to classify climate change mitigation as naive and to confront such sympathies with notions of: ‘at the end of the day you look after number one’ (FG7). Such cynical and narrow rationality can make responding to the issue appear delusional and likely subject to being disciplined through light ridicule: ‘I know you’re driving a Prius but I’m not like you’ (Laughter) (ibid.). Other key field patterns identified included: The reaction of some of the formal education academics and secondary teachers displayed the reworking of the issue through positivist knowledge, didactic pedagogy and its reductive subject divisions. Also for the academics having high levels of technical climate science knowledge appeared to afford some members an inflated sense of esteem and institutional hubris. Finally, the environmentalists’ appeared strongly stimulated by effectuating sustainable social change discussing the actions and attitudes of the vignettes’ characters in terms of how they might relate to broader social rather than personal change. They also drew on their own experiences as activists or Ecovillagers to interpret the scenarios involved. These field-framings of everyday life are clearly present in how the participants come to interpret their relationship to climate change and therefore appear crucial for engaging actual publics. They stir up genuine concerns as well as help structure sense-making on the topic.

The problem with information and differences in issue ownership As noted in the Imagined Publics section, much of the packaging of climate change messages for public consumption has been based on summarising the science pushing the weight of scientific authority and focusing on major international political and scientific climate change events. How participants respond to this technical and expert-driven framing of climate change also reveals significant differences both between and within participant groups and again disputes simple assumptions about a rationally responsive public. While the focus group script directed attention towards responding to climate change through lowering energy use or getting informed the openended questions on climate change causes, impacts and solutions


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encouraged direct discussion of climate change itself. Reactions to having to deal directly with the topic differed significantly between groups, with composure, competence and confidence around discussing the issue varying by, a sense of status and class position, and by levels of cultural capital (e.g. educational credentials, familiarity with dominant culture and expert discourses, cf. Bourdieu, 1984). Those displaying the most difficulty in conversing directly on the issue were the Community Employment Scheme (CES) members and most of the farmers. For example, the CES group’s response to the cue to discuss the causes of climate change included long silences, hesitantly interrupted by single words such as ‘cars’ and ‘chemicals’. Eventually, a participant proffered a hesitant explanation that conflated climate change with the hole in the ozone layer. This initiated a brief uncertain discussion during which the conflation was upheld. The sense of inadequacy was even more apparent during the life history interview of one CES participant who when asked to comment on ‘climate change’ appeared suddenly anxious, eventually responding with a hesitancy that deviated from the rest of our discussion: ‘climate change I wouldn’t ah am you know too much about it really’ (LHI18). The majority of the conventional farmers were also treading in largely unfamiliar and uncertain territory and proved very hesitant in discussing climate change directly. Initially, they resisted an expert-oriented climate change, subduing a scientific packaging and dissemination of it under a lively and comic tempo – which largely characterised most of the discussion. However, when one farmer, a retired agricultural science teacher, engaged in a long monologue on the greenhouse effect containing technical terms such as ‘infrared radiation’ and ‘stratosphere’, his words were met with a prolonged silence. Encountering this expert-owned version of climate change risks exposure to a sense of one’s own inadequacy, with the capacity to reason in the abstract of climate change being far from equally distributed among participants. For example, a lack of technical fluency with the topic was discernible within the CES group, with one CES member replying that ‘a tonne of carbon dioxide that doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t know what it means really’ (FG11). In contrast, other groups, particularly some of the academics and Ecovillage members, showed considerable familiarity with the topic, with some even involved, or at least perceiving themselves to be, in the struggle to define climate change. For example, some Ecovillage members suggested renaming ‘climate change’ as it seemed too benign a term while the climate expert from the academic group used ‘we’ when discussing climate scientists’ work: when we checked for global cooling that we found that the opposite signal was the case. (FG1)

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However, this is not merely a case of topic knowledgeability as demonstrated by two business group members who generally ignored the issue but had the composure and confidence to join and largely dominate focus group discussions around it. Background differences offer some explanation for these variations in familiarity and composure with the issue. Most of the Ecovillagers were highly qualified: two of them held PhDs and three had lectured at third level. Similarly, the business group were all operating at management level. In contrast, the level of formal education was much lower among farmers and CES; with some CES participants having had experienced significant spells of long-term unemployment. Within-group variations regarding climate change assuredness could also be attributed to similar differences, with those with higher qualifications and career status speaking with the most confidence on the topic. For example, the two farmers that were most willing and equipped to converse about the science of climate change – including the farmer who introduced the aforementioned monologue – also happened to be (former) secondary teachers.

The force of framing and engagement Participants were able to connect to climate change on a variety of levels – as opposed to merely understanding the science. For example, the climate campers group deviated from the dominant science framing, instead referring to ‘rampant consumerism’ and the widespread belief in infinite economic growth as root causes of climate change. Moreover, a richness in connectivity was apparent for those strongly engaged with the issue, displaying a combined readiness to confront climate change through lifestyle changes, seeking information, voting decisions and/or advocating for stronger policies and public engagement. The environmentalist, academics and organic growers’ groups, a teacher, a student and two Steiner members were all strongly engaged, with most revealing a tendency to classify it as both catastrophic and morally unjust in a manner that linked to their salient and emotive view of climate change. They connected to the issue via negative emotions as they spoke of their ‘frustration’, the ‘bad feeling’ (FG6), depression, sadness and guilt, which emerged from lack of public concern or how ‘unfair’ (FG5) it was that developing countries who contributed the least will suffer the most. Climate campers, Eco-villagers and Steiner members also spoke of more positive emotions from the strength of community and the euphoric buzz of collective action. They were the only participants to show some resistance to framings of climate action as involving pain and sacrifice in recognising that some emotive rewards existed in feeling part of a community and playing a collective role in activating some sort of response to the issue.


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In contrast, most of the farmers, CES members, production operators, two businessmen, and one Steiner member could be described as relatively disengaged. These participants generally demonstrated low attentiveness to climate change communication and a poorer grasp of the subject. Climate change issues had no bearing on their voting behaviours and their suspect claims of dealing with it consisted of minor acts which they tenuously connected to climate change. In fact, some CES members included the purchasing of tea tree oil toothpaste and reducing litter as their response to climate change. Regular references to burning rubbish and recycling among the rest of the relatively disengaged suggest that these participants draw on more tangible environmental items to define climate change, displaying a tendency to conflate anything environmental with climate change. Perhaps with climate change being distant from their priorities, it was not sufficiently distinguishable for them as an issue in its own right – unlike the issue-status it had attained with the strongly engaged participants who avoided any conflation. The evidence presented so far shows clearly how far removed Irish publics can be from an imagined rational public responsive to information. This said, some of the media coverage of climate change may have had selffulfilling contributions to reducing the perceived roles of relatively disengaged participants. Apart from specific related requirements of their field – for example, the farmers above – many relatively disengaged viewed their potential roles in terms of being consumers with individualised responsibilities. I think we’ve done enough, we’ve bought environmentally friendly cars6 and now if you get a ‘08 car now it’s top of the range […] it’s dear, d’you know I think we’re doing enough, we’re doing an awful lot like I mean it’s not just, not just talking about it like. (FG9)

While it is hard to trace exactly the origins of this position, consumer choice framings of de-carbonisation have been widespread from the Power of One campaign to adverts mentioning the energy-saving qualities of products. The comments on recycling, switching houselights off at night, buying environmentally friendly products all fit into this framing and often were poorly linked to climate change. In fact, deeper questioning of participants frequently revealed that genuine motivations were distant from the issue of climate change, such as inclinations towards frugality. Still, existing frames coupled with the obvious underrepresentation of a public civically and critically engaged with climate change clearly facilitate and promote certain viewpoints. For example, the consumerist framing of imagined publics resonated with the common refrain of everyone-doing-their-bit among those who were disengaged, mirroring the almost complete absence of debate concerning class-related emission inequalities. By requiring significant financial input,

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the consumerist stance also severely limits participation by lower economic groups: Anna: […] buying an electric car would cost you a fortune, changing your house over to solar energy will cost you a fortune Tony: Very prohibitive yah Anna: […] it’s a great idea to help the world but the pocket just sometimes doesn’t allow it. (FG10)

Their discussion captures how economic restrictions become central to climate change engagement for lower economic groups, against the backdrop of climate change communication that homogenises the public as citizen-consumers whose choices and consumption practices shape mitigation efforts. In contrast, strong engagers like the Climate Campers often placed their collective engagements over and above individual-level changes in consumption, with many strong engagers not even mentioning recycling as part of their decarbonising efforts.

Discussion: towards a more participatory and deliberative climate change As this study demonstrates, the receptivity of actual publics is strongly influenced by their social circumstances. They relate to climate change not merely through monetary possibilities of growth or savings but, through their societal fields such as education and agriculture and through how their class cultural empowerment measures up to the cultural status of the issue’s associated discourses (e.g. scientific). They also can relate to it emotively and through political and moral interpretations. Climate change communication therefore passes through a complex system of reinterpretation shaped by practices (including discursive practices), cultural values and socio-structural conditions, in turn producing diverse and sometimes unintended outcomes, including disengaging the public by underplaying its potential role in climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Our empirical findings thus confirm and further extend the results of existing social-scientific work in this field (Edmondson & Rau, 2008; Hulme, 2009; Norgaard, 2011). The mismatch between imagined and actual publics discussed in this paper shows how climate change communication both under-represents the public and overlooks its diverse make-up and capacity for engaging with the issue. Current communication and advocacy largely fails to address field-related and socially situated modes of reasoning and concerns through which actual publics may already (and potentially) connect to the issue of climate change – for example, through the food politics of organic growers. Instead they communicate as though addressing a narrow imagined


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public made up of consumers and individuals receptive to and swayed by the authority of scientific expertise. Unintended consequences of the resultant discourse and framing include how imagining the public as mere consumers reinforces an already widespread reductionism of the active consumer of neoliberalism, which as evident from the observations, may have diminutive and exclusionary effects on how actual publics perceive their role. Lowering personal emissions through consumption can be seen as too expensive or tenuous. The observations also highlight how the dominance of information-deficit-thinking among political and media elites attaches the subject of climate change to elite discourses where ‘cultural capital facilitation of climate change fluency’ encourages ‘elite ownership of much of climate change’s construction’ (Fox, 2014: 196). This does not mean that participants with lower educational and cultural capital are incapable of dealing with the topic. Instead, they tend to feel alienated and may engage in a form of self-censorship upon encountering dominant framings of it. The rich empirical examples presented above indicate a need to uncover a greater understanding of actual publics and to make climate change relevant to their field-specific interests and to their everyday reasonableness, sensitivities and priorities. This goes beyond merely broad indiscriminate appeals to homogenous imagined publics. More deliberative communicative processes that recognise existing power relations and address this plurality of potential engagement need to be considered. This deliberative approach should take on board where actual publics are coming from, provide room for them to express their genuine and relevant concerns, and mitigate against imposing and exclusionary forms of debate. Here, established proposals for a more deliberative democratic model deserve renewed attention (e.g. Cohen, 1997; Dryzek, 2000; Gutmann & Thompson, 2009). Deliberative democracy involves the ideal that citizens are free to deliberate in a dialogic manner not bound by pre-existing norms, unequal power relations and with access and openness to all relevant sources of information (Cohen, 1997; Gutmann & Thompson, 2009). There is also a strong emphasis in deliberative democracy thinking on supporting proposals with reasons and on recognising and respecting the ‘deliberative capacity’ of others through the provisioning of such reasons (Cohen, 1997; Dryzek 2000). Naturally, aspirations for more deliberative practices may or may not be successfully implemented, depending on the situation and context. For example, the deliberative democracy debate acknowledges that multiple practical obstacles can prevent the deliberative ideal from being reached, including the unequal distribution of deliberative capacity among members of the public (Cohen, 1997) as described in detail in this paper. People’s deliberative capacities are tied to largely unconscious standards by which they

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judge, which are greatly shaped by the social conditions from which people emerge (Bourdieu, 1984). As with our participants societal power relations based on distinctions such as status, cultural or economic capital thus become absorbed into these practical ways of evaluating climate change issues, thus hampering deliberative ideals of either fully removing or at least mitigating inequalities in deliberative capacity. Countering some of these inequalities through expanding provision of all relevant forms of information that actually broaden the discourse (as opposed to strengthening one dominant view such as the eco-modernist frame) forms another central pillar of deliberative democracy thinking. In the context of this study, broadening discourse would require media representations of the plurality of climate change perspectives, including moral, social justice and even affective discourses, as well as divergent beliefs of society-environment relations. For example, communicators can report on the neglected issues raised in the Background section of this article – for example, de-growth and local climate change funding. They can also highlight community-based initiatives and the emotive and empowering effects of coming together as communities in response to the problem. Further relevant information includes the underlying power relations and history of the stances being made in order to guard against misinformation and relativism. We contend that how aspects of climate change relate to the social circumstances of actual publics such as through class dimensions and diverse fields of interest is also relevant information. For communicators to imagine a public as either rational or irrational is to further decontextualise them. Instead, as is evident here, for actual publics there is a reasonableness in the quotidian, practical and field-framed world they inhabit (Bourdieu, 1984: 468). This reasonableness is far from infallible and consequently not something to be appealed to in a manner that risks reinforcement but should itself to be part of the debate. To illustrate from our research this would include addressing how de-carbonisation threatens current farming life as well as the emission-heavy origins of that lifestyle and possibilities for resilience and sustainability. Communication that deals with these issues needs to be complemented with a deliberative discussion that integrates the concerns rather than isolates them to singular matters of growth or science. This entails deliberating on collective and personal responsibility and societal goals, and recognition of the multi-scalar spatiality of mitigation and adaptation efforts ranging from tangible local initiatives to distant international framing. However, to move further beyond information-deficit approaches such deliberation should also be supplemented and possibly channelled through the institutions and fields in which publics obtain their shape. This may require employing existing or creating new deliberative practices within the fields.


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Finally, widening the discourse on climate change would also require moving beyond mainstream ecological modernisation thinking to recognise areas of conflict between climate change and economic growth. The latter points towards currently existing, hard-to-shift obstacles to deliberative democracy that arise from mainstream media’s unquestioned support for economic growth objectives pursued by the political and economic establishment. These persistent affinities position climate change mitigation efforts within the predominant competition state agenda which subordinates social policy to the goals of economic competitiveness (Kirby & Murphy, 2011). For example, the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2015 enshrines into legislation a weak eco-modernist, pro-growth approach to climate mitigation that rests upon controlled top-down management of the issue (see also Fox & Rau 2016). The ‘least cost’ wording of the bill obstructs potentially necessary radical changes that might place a ‘burden on the exchequer’ (DECLG, 2015: 11). Furthermore, the bill fails to recognise the potential of bottom-up, citizen-led governance of climate change, thereby reinforcing the media’s homogenous, information-deficient and relatively powerless imagined public described in this paper. Essentially, it fails to recognise opportunities arising from deliberative forms of citizen engagement. The media’s competition-state affinities, can also be seen in how it vastly favours the expertise of mainstream economists to other academics (Fox, 2014: 139), thereby contributing to subordinating climate change beneath growth-centric concerns as economists rarely speak on the issue and those that do, promote economistic and technocratic framings of mitigation (e.g. McCarthy, 2014; FitzGerald, 2016). Six One News reporting on a major oil find off the Cork coast further demonstrates the media’s adherence to mainstream competition state narrative, even at the expense of the favoured ecomodernist framing. Although clearly climate change related, Six One News did not mention the environment and seven out of eight people it drew comments from were oil and business personnel who emphasised the potential economic benefits (Cullinane & Watson, 2014). It is thus little surprising that where the media focuses on climate change, it often draws on an eco-modernist frame that portrays climate change mitigation as potentially enhancing Ireland’s economy. In sum, the quality and scope of media coverage in Ireland either omits climate change from its overriding concern with economic competitiveness or tends to eclipse the plurality of the issue in favour of progrowth and eco-modernist framings, thereby reflecting a rather narrow view of the public as more or less exclusively lead by economic interests. Again, this stands in stark contrast to the depictions of heterogeneous actual publics in the preceding section. How can the plurality of actual publics described in this paper be more accurately portrayed in the media, with a view to enhancing public

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engagement in climate change issues? One possible option would be to directly address communities using alternative modes of communication that enjoy great popularity in Ireland such as social media, local radio and freesheets. Some key advocates and climate scientists have also arrived at recognising this need by calling for a citizen’s convention on the issue that reaches ‘every local community, every town, every city in the country’ (Mullins as cited in NewsTalk, 2016). Climate scientist and advocate Professor John Sweeney sees such a convention as necessary for ‘sustained, citizen-led, engagement that is now essential to unite all of society in embracing and designing our critically urgent transition to a secure, just, democratic and authentically sustainable post-carbon world’ (ibid.). Any such efforts, however, must attempt to bridge the gap, as it is portrayed here, between their imagined and actual publics to avoid reproducing existing forms of issue-exclusion or pigeonholing. Deliberative democracy approaches that foster greater access to the discussion and make visible connections between climate change and everyday concerns and the situatedness of actual publics are therefore worthy of further consideration.

Conclusion Communication plays a crucial part in constructing notions of climate change and its relationship to the public within a society. The (perhaps unwitting) reproduction of representations of climate change that mirror dominant social, political and cultural hierarchies and that embed a particular view of the world into much of everyday life represents a key feature of media coverage in Ireland today. This reduces debates around ‘climate change’ to narrow and potentially alienating discourses that diminish wider publics’ ownership of the issue, potentially undermining citizen engagement in mitigation efforts. Furthermore, the prevalence of a narrow technical view of climate change, aimed at a supposedly rational and calculating public, allots a sense of issue-ownership to the few: those equipped with the necessary linguistic and literacy skills, along with a requisite sense of empowerment. Appeals to an imagined audience that is deemed to be both largely disengaged and averse to change, seriously limits opportunities for collective decarbonisation. The audience that should be recognised is one that is socially embedded, diverse and changeable, which has wide-ranging consequences for climate change mitigation efforts as aptly demonstrated in this paper. We argue that climate change advocates and politicians need to develop a more inclusive, pluralistic view of the public that recognises their everyday practices and the cultural, material and social circumstances in which they are embedded. Here, a participatory approach that incorporates key principles of deliberative democracy could facilitate new forms and levels of public engagement that incorporate genuine dialogue concerning the risks and


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responsibilities of climate change mitigation. As demonstrated in this paper, a highly nuanced understanding of the composition and nature of the public clearly provides exciting opportunities for engaging citizens in climate change debates and mitigation efforts in a manner that reflects their lives and what matters most to them.

Notes 1. Henceforth Ireland. 2. Although ‘actual publics’ is somewhat inept it suits the contrastive purpose of the article. 3. An alternative explanation for its success for example might possibly be that an expanding economistic hegemony within Irish society, especially during the socalled ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom from 1995–2007, made economic reasons for pro-environmental behaviour more socially acceptable in contrast to, openly using ethical or moral justifications which have possibly lost currency during that period. 4. The research is from the first author’s doctoral thesis (cf. Fox, 2014). 5. Presumably he meant additional payments on residential housing such as the local property tax. 6. It seems he considered newer cars as more environmentally-friendly possibly due to efficiency gains.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Conor Little and Diarmuid Torney for their very helpful feedback and for considering us for this symposium.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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