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

by focusing on “short-term pragmatic actions that fit within economic and political imperatives” (p. 83), these strategies actually undermine efforts to address climate change. This mode of public engagement functions well within the logic of economically liberal democracies. It fits the hegemonic technomanagerial discourses of sustainable development and ecological modernization that we discussed earlier.

The second mode of public engagement involves enhancing the role of citizens in policy-making processes through public-participation arrangements. In the last few decades, multiple voices in academia and in the political sphere have called for forms of governance that further the participation of the public in political decision making. The movement for Public Engagement with Science and Technology has promoted the inclusion and the participation of citizens in matters that involve scientific and technologic knowledge and in corresponding political decisions (e.g., House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, 2000). Citizen participation in environmental issues has been promoted as the guarantor of better and more accountable decisions (e.g., Coenen, 2010; Dietz & Stern, 2008). In political arenas, there is increasing recognition that the strength of democracies and the quality of decisions is a function of public participation and engagement. The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), and the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making, and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (1998) have all decreed the importance of public participation and access to information on environmental issues.

As Arnstein pointed out in her seminal 1969 article, the “ladder of participation” has several steps, and public participation is arranged in different shades, from information and consultation to deliberation. Although participation has mainly taken the form of information gathering and public consultation, various countries have experimented with citizen juries, consensus conferences, and other deliberative formats of public participation (e.g., Kleinman, Delborne, & Anderson, 2011).