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

of community members who are less likely to be heard (Peterson, Peterson, & Peterson, 2005; Peterson, Peterson, Peterson, Allison, & Gore, 2006). As Ivie (2001) demonstrated, dissonance is needed to invite contestability and to critique the terms that threaten to compromise political difference.

An agonistic approach to democratic politics sets aside the assumption that once its citizens become rational every nation will eventually accept a similar brand of liberal democracy. Rather than constructing democracy as a fragile ornament that must be protected, curtailed, or even suspended when chaos threatens, that must be deferred or delegated until divisive circumstances subside and a political culture made up of reliably informed and rational citizens finally emerges, it proposes democracy as an open clash of political positions that may occur today (Ivie, 2004, 2011).

Although centrist approaches, such as the Washington Consensus in the United States and the Third Way in the European Union, enjoy political success, the consensus-based democracy they represent weakens both liberty and freedom (Mouffe, 2000). The focus on meeting in the middle has meant giving up both the quest for equality and the quest for liberty and has been achieved only by relegating emotional and aesthetic epistemologies to an extrapolitical sphere. In such a context, it makes perfect sense to proclaim a postpolitical world, for a value-free politics is irrelevant.

Agonistic politics holds special potential in the case of climate change communication because climate change is the opposite of the ideal situation for consensus. Consensus processes are ideal for situations in which “scientific information about an environmental issue has high predictive power and its application is relatively uncontested” (Peterson, Peterson, & Peterson, 2005, p. 766). In disputes that are laden with sharp power differentials and complex uncertainties, however, the drive toward consensus reinforces public apathy and cynicism, and reinforces existing power relationships (Peterson, Peterson, & Peterson,