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

This involves dissent over alternative political projects. The third mode of engagement cultivates political conflict and rejects the viability of consensus between opposing viewpoints.

Peterson, Peterson, & Peterson (2005) noted that officially sanctioned public-participation practices often require bracketing conflict and thus involve treating the current political hegemony as truth. As Mouffe (2000) contended, the illusion of consensus is fatal to democracy because a healthy democratic process requires recognition of differing interests and the recognition that open conflict over differing interests is legitimate. Turning to the relations between discourse and politics, Ivie (2004, p. 21) specified that “democratic dissent … is as alarming to the purveyors of prevailing opinion as it is critical to a nation’s political welfare.” Ivie (2004) and Peterson et al. (2005) added that dominant elites generally prefer consensus-based approaches to those based on debate because they have access to sufficient resources to hold out until some semblance of consensus is reached. Reliance on squelching argumentation not only jeopardizes democracy by legitimizing existing hegemonic configurations of power and precluding resistance against dominant elites, however; it also artificially reduces power relationships to superficial conflicts of interest, presumably reconcilable through mutual good will. Without debate regarding their political dimensions, for example, government practices that contribute to anthropogenic climate change are naturalized. In the absence of such debate, existing hierarchies become uncontested reality rather than outgrowths of neoliberal economic goals with serious implications for the global climate.

The notion of politics that underpins the third mode of engagement with climate change places difference and confrontation at the center of public life. Chantal Mouffe (e.g., 1993/2005) argued that conflict and antagonism are inevitable in social life and that it is necessary to envisage ways to create a pluralistic democratic order that can make space for those differences.