Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

which Norwegian citizens relate to top-down communication on climate change and how they construct their roles and responsibilities, as well as roles and responsibilities of politicians, in mitigating the problem. As Laclau and Mouffe (e.g., 1985) argued, meanings are never fully fixed: They are dependent on specific uses of language (comprising verbal, visual, and other semiotic resources), as well as on social and cultural contexts; similarly, identities are relational, dependent on communication practices and therefore unstable. Ryghaug and Næss examine the ways in which climate change and people’s perceived powerlessness to address it are discursively organized and (re)negotiated in the domestic context of people’s daily lives. They show that understandings of climate change and of climate change politics are strongly linked to media discourses, to political discourses, and to people’s living conditions, and that political critique and disengagement result from perceived contradictions in political management of and (in)action regarding the problem.

Schweizer and Thompson offer important insight into place-based public understandings of climate change. Among its other challenges, engaging climate change is complicated by perceptual matters, such as disconnection from the natural world, which prevents many people from noticing subtle changes in the environment (Moser, 2010). By looking at (the potential for) communication about climate change in U.S. national parks, they address the geographical challenges that were pointed out earlier and make crucial suggestions in terms of both cognitive and affective dimensions of engagement with climate change (cf. Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, & Whitmarsh, 2007), which can be politically mobilized or activated at the individual level. They note that citizens are exposed to many messages about climate change on a daily basis. Research has shown that these messages resonate more effectively when they are meaningful to the audience and framed consistently with cultural values and beliefs, and when they suggest specific actions that audience members feel comfortable taking. Based on place-attachment theory and experiences with place-based education, the authors theorize