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

However, the impacts of these exercises are limited. The institutional and sociocultural conditions for dialogical communication between citizens, researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders have rarely been fulfilled, and public participation is often viewed as a mere legitimation tool that can be quite exclusionary (e.g., Besley, 2010; Braun & Schultz, 2010).

Delgado, Kjølberg, and Wickson (2010) have argued that there are tensions and ambiguities regarding rationales of public participation, who is a relevant participant, pros and cons of invited versus self-organizing citizen groups, the stage at which citizens should be involved, and context specificity versus transferability of public-participation models. In a study of discourses on civic engagement with climate change in Denmark, Lassen, Horsbøl, Bonnen, and Pedersen (2011) confirmed these problems; they found vagueness and a lack of clarity regarding citizen roles in policy processes. One case they studied was led by a Danish municipality, Frederikshavn, that aims to rely exclusively on renewable sources of energy by 2015 and that has called for citizen activism on climate change to help reach that goal—a paradoxical appeal, given that activism is normally a means of protesting, rather than buttressing, centralized control.

Another initiative worth mentioning that attempted to involve citizen voices at a different scale is World Wide Views (WWViews, n.d.), a “global” consultation process led by the Danish Board of Technology. Some 38 countries took part in organizing local deliberations on September 26, 2009. The process involved group discussions on various aspects of climate change and the formulation of a consensus message for negotiators at COP15. The stated goal of WWViews was “to give a broad sample of citizens from across the world the opportunity to influence the COP15 negotiations and thereby the future of global climate policy … [and] to demonstrate that political decision-making processes on a global scale can benefit from the participation of ordinary people” (WWViews, n.d.). Analyzing the Danish local deliberation event, Phillips (2011) has