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

Attempts to engage the public in this first mode typically involve social-marketing tools. Market research, cognitive theory, and strategic communication are employed to appeal to individual behavior change. For example, Greenpeace has used the polar bear to inspire people to act on climate change (Slocum, 2004). A range of other organizations, from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP & Futerra, 2005) to WWF-UK, the Climate Outreach and Information Network, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth, and Oxfam (Crompton, 2010) have attempted to ascertain the optimal communication strategies for environmental matters. O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole (2009) explored the utility of fear as a motivator for individual action to mitigate climate change, and Nisbet and Kotcher (2009) documented the use of personalized blogs to develop and maintain a strong relationship with potential climate change activists.

Social-marketing campaigns emphasize communication’s instrumental, rather than its constitutive, dimensions and serve the purpose of persuasion by employing demonstrably effective communication formulas in a top-down process. Consistent with this perspective, Lakoff (2010) and Nisbet (2009) claimed that appropriate framing is a basic tool for persuading citizens to support climate change policy. Moser and Dilling (2007) asserted that motivating individual action through persuasive communication and education offer a powerful basis for social change needed in response to anthropogenic climate change.

Brulle (2010), however, maintained that by professionalizing communication and thereby turning communication experts into the arbiters of environmentalism, social marketing further excludes citizens from the processes of decision making that are needed to deal with climate change (see also Corner & Randall, 2011). Similarly, Paterson and Stripple (2010) argued that social marketing can be read as a form of governmentality (cf. Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). Brulle (2010) argued that social-marketing campaigns fail to promote the political mobilization that would enact the vast transformations necessary to address climate change. In his view,