Negotiating Climates of Conflict: climate communication, social

practices and behavioural change

Stewart Barr

Geography

Four Intellectual Challenges

1. What do we know about public attitudes to climate change?

2. How we do climate change communication research;

3. How we relate climate change to everyday social practices;

4. How we establish a meaningful dialogue for positive change.

1. What do we know about public attitudes to climate change?

“I do [feel concerned about climate change] but the world always changes anyway ... a little person like me can't stop the Americans driving their cars ... so I can't worry about it” (extract from Barr et al., 2011)

• Reported concern in surveys does not equate to behavioural intention or responses;

• We need to develop more sophisticated methods for exploring public attitudes to climate change.

2. How we do climate change communication

research

Knowledge into Action?

‘Factors’ that intervene...• Time;

• Convenience;

• Knowledge;

• Personal responsibility;

• Environmental concern;

• Values;

• Etc...

Climate Change requires a new approach because...

• It is regarded as contested knowledge;• Ascriptions of responsibility are unclear and contested;• It acts / impacts at different scales;• It cuts across sites of practice.

(Barr et al., 2011)

“When faced with problems like the value - action gap, or with behaviours that do not respond as normal, the tendency is to commission further studies in the same mould. This results in a self-sustaining paradigm, along with an entire industry of research and advice in which behaviour is consistently treated as something that is shaped by factors” (Shove, 2010, p. 1276).

3. How we relate climate change to everyday social practices

Social practices ‘‘. . .are conceived as being routine-driven, everyday activities situated in time and space and shared by groups of people as part of their everyday life’’ (Verbeek and Mommaas, 2008, p. 634).

‘‘What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing ofordinary, routinized and taken for granted practice. Thisrequires an upending of the social environmental research agenda as conventionally formulated (Shove, 2003, p. 9).

‘‘I suppose people think a holiday is a holiday and that they go there to relax and do their own thing. And you know, it sounds a bit nasty but you know, when you’re on holiday, you’re really thinking about yourself aren’t you because it’s your time away’’ (extract from Barr et al. 2011)

4. How we establish a meaningful dialogue for positive change

• Understanding the practices that are relevant to climate-related behaviours;

• Exploring the underlying social, historical and economic dimensions of such practices;

And...• Flattening the science-lay or expert-

publics landscape through co-creation of climate knowledges...

New forms of knowledge exchange

• View academics as co-producers of knowledge with policy makers and citizens;

• ‘Radical Scientific Method’ (Lane et al., 2010) for contested problems;

• Co-learning as an engaged practice around key points of conflict through competency groups.

ESRC Follow-on Fund project ‘Co-creating pro-environmental behavioural change

campaigns for sustainable mobility’