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

4 focus primarily on engagement through social marketing, and chapters 5, 6, and 7 look at engagement mainly—albeit in no way exclusively—as public participation. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 focus on engagement through agonistic pluralism, whereas chapters 4 through 10 all suggest connections between either social marketing or public participation and agonistic pluralism. Further, this organizational framework highlights a question suggested earlier. At least since the late 1980s, climate change has assumed an increasingly central and contested role within public discourse. The essays in this volume examine how climate change communication has shaped and been shaped by the contemporary political landscape. Our intent is to demonstrate ways that each of these forms of public engagement may contribute differently, yet complementarily, to a democratically informed strategy for bringing politics to bear on the issue of climate change.

This book explores cases from a wide range of countries, including Norway, Sweden, the United States, China, India, and Yemen. These countries are in very different stages of economic development, represent diverse forms of political governance, and also have different legal-political statuses in the international regime on climate change: In the context of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC (which the United States did not ratify), the first three are expected to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions whereas the latter three are considered developing countries that are therefore exempt from that commitment. The multiscalar nature of climate change is often described as a challenge to effective mitigation politics. Some chapters in this book focus on the national scale but several cut across geographical scales, looking at the interplay between various local, national, and global spaces of communication and political action.

Chapter 2 offers a critical diagnosis of the possibilities of engagement with climate change from the point of view of “ordinary citizens”—that is, people who are not actively involved in social or political movements to address the problem. Ryghaug and Næss discuss the ways in