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

government, economy, and society. Moreover, the campaign involved a large number of (communicative) events that were conceived and put in place by citizen groups as politically meaningful acts. Feldpausch-Parker et al. draw on Giddens’s structuration theory to argue that the public can mobilize resources, including but not limited to communication, to influence policy makers. Apart from the potential for actual transformation of (inter)governmental politics, this project suggests that citizens around the world feel politically motivated to self-constitute into agents of protest and debate on climate change, challenging the claims that current democracies are postpolitical. The 350.org initiatives aimed to offer an alternative to governmental politics. Although they are very diverse, all those communicative actions render the citizen an actor of the political—that is, the confrontation of proposals to respond to collective problems.

In the following chapter, Polli explores another form of political agency: art as communication on climate change that can promote awareness of, critiques of, and alternative options to hegemonic positions. Her essay discusses the implications of different models to manage access to, use of, and—as she argues—ownership of the air. She takes issue with technomanagerial constructs, such as emissions markets and trading and the privatization of the atmosphere. The chapter points out that art may have contributed to the cultural acceptance of the commodification of air and other immaterial resources, and she then moves on to discuss the work of a number of artists who have created alternative visualizations of problems associated to air pollution and fossil fuels. They unsettle understandings of causation, responsibility, and commercialization; some artworks specifically engage emissions trading and interactively expose its flaws. As Mouffe (2007) has argued, art can play a critical role in undermining the program of total social mobilization of capitalism, which permeates climate politics at multiple levels. Polli shows that politically dominant discourses on the atmosphere can be questioned and subverted, and that art can be focal to oppositional struggles and to remaking the political in climate politics. Most artworks