Communicating Urgency Facilitating Social Change

1
Communicating Urgency Facilitating Social Change

• New Strategies
• for Climate Change
• Susi Moser
• Boulder, June 8-11, 2004

2
Welcome!

• The Challenge
• The Territory
• The Map
• The Goals
• How We Might Get There

3
Turning the Titanic?
or Will the Frog Jump Out of the Boiling Pot?
A frog in water doesnt feel it boil in
time. Dude, we are that frog. Winning haiku in
Grist Magazine Competition June 2004
4
Why the Communication Social Change Interface?

• What is not seen does not exist
• Detection and naming of problem
• Public agenda setting
• What is not understood is dismissed, denied, or
  polemically discussed
• Facilitation of informed public discourse
  about issue and solutions
• How something is framed determines response
• Influence on issue culture
• What is not talked about exerts no political
  pressure
• Link between public discourse and political stage
• Without knowing about accessible solutions
  we will do nothing
• Critical RD
• Pioneers, models, early adopters
• Promotion

5
The Difficult Character ofClimate Change

• Global
• Complex system (with lags and thresholds)
• Defined and perceived as slow/gradual or as
  occurring in the far future
• Difficult to detect
• Causes pervasive solutions challenging
  (we have found the scapegoat and it is us)
• Impacts dispersed not all bad many
  creeping phenomena
• Cumulative, synergistic
• Uncertainty pervasive
• Politically very controversial

6
Public Perceptions of Climate Change

• 90 of American public aware of global warming
• For 30 it is personally serious, urgent, worth
  worrying about
• Still confusion about causes of global warming
• Global warming seen as inevitable and unfixable
• Related to irreversible deterioration of moral
  values
• Few know about solutions most are (believed to
  be) ineffective or irrelevant
• Few if any studies have looked at adaptation
  climate variability
• The typical global warming news story
  overwhelms and immobilizes people.
  (Frameworks Institute
  2003)

7
Societal Resistance to Change

• Some examples
• Design life of a power plant 30 years
• Design life of a dam decades to 100 years
• Dominant economic paradigm and supporting social
  structures decades to centuries
• Habits years to a lifetime
• Values change over generations

The conditions that brought us anthropogenic
climate change, as well as the conditions
surrounding future options for dealing with it,
are embedded in socioeconomic structures and
value systems, embracing material advancement and
fossil fuels, structures and values that are
highly resistant to change. Trumbo
and Shanahan, 2000
8
Communicating

• What shall we say?
• How shall we say it?
• Who should say it?
• To whom shall we speak, and
  when?
• Through what channels?
• How might we - and our message -
  be received?
• Does anyone care anyway?

9
Urgency

• If a red light blinks on in a cockpit, should
  the pilot ignore it until it speaks in an
  unexcited tone?
• Exactly how should one point out that there
  are too many of us consuming too much stuff,
  trashing for short-term profit the life-support
  system that we and all other creatures depend
  upon? Is there any way to say that sweetly?
  Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay
  attention?
• Donella Meadows

10
Facilitating

• Websters Make possible, make easy or easier,
  smooth the progress of, help or assist, reduce
  resistance
• INNOVATION
• INCENTIVES
• PROMOTION
• PRACTICAL HELP, RESOURCES, TOOLS
• REMOVAL OF BARRIERS
• Also Plan, implement, evaluate, obtain
  commitments, agree on norms, give prompts
• STRATEGY
• CONTINUAL ENCOURAGEMENT MAINTENANCE
• DEMOCRATIC PROCESS

11
Social Change

• What needs changing? how deep do we aim?
• Who is changing? consumers, human species,
  citizens, people with hearts and minds
• Where to start or focus? scales of
  action/behavior
• Over what timeframe? once or repeat actions?
• What is in the way? barriers and how to
  overcome them?

12
New Strategies for Climate Change

• Working toward
• Research and Action Agendas
• Synthesis article in Environment, BAMS
• Edited volume of papers emerging from this
  workshop
• New projects, new collaborations
• Having fun along the way

13
Challenges for Workshop

• Walking Our Talk
• Communicating across disciplinary boundaries
• Communicating across professional boundaries
• Theoretical Integration/Complementarity
• Different disciplines
• Levels of social change
• Maintaining credibility for
  academics and relevance
  for practitioners
• Balance of research and
  action agendas

14
Getting there.

• Lets practice what we preach.
• Conversation Styles
• Based on Kahn (1974) The Seminar

15
Free-For-All

• Its all about winning
• Approval
• Self-esteem
• Recognition
• Anything goes
• Im smart youre not

16
Beauty Contest

• Parading ideas in bathing suits
  and high heels
• Isnt my idea the best?
• And while youre out front, Im backstage
  prepping for my next appearance

17
Distinguished House Tour

• Your idea is an interesting and beautiful house
  lets explore it
• How well is it built, decorated? Does it hold up
  to poking?
• Lets move on to the next house

18
Barn Raising

• Someone offers an idea
• Lets work on it together
• Lets use others ideas
  to make the barn even better
• How do the pieces fit?

19
Thank you for being here!