Journalism and Media (Scholarly Articles)

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  • Publication
    Public communication of climate and justice: A scoping review
    (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, 2025-01-30) Tschötschel, Robin S.; Diamond, Emily; Howley, Shannon E.; McNally, Brenda; Morris, Hanna E.; Perry, Kelly E.; Wilhelmsen, Marthe Elden
    The intersection of public communication, climate change, and justice constitutes a nascent but growing interdisciplinary field of vital importance as climate change, driven largely by consumption patterns in high-income counties, disproportionately affects communities with limited adaptive capacity, raising profound justice concerns. This scoping review delves into the emerging domain of public communication regarding climate and justice and seeks to provide a comprehensive overview that may help guide future research. It maps the landscape of existing peer-reviewed journal scholarship, identifying trends and gaps across disciplines such as communication, energy politics, and urban planning. Following a birds-eye quantitative analysis of English peer-reviewed journal articles in the field (N = 250 studies), six thematic areas are scrutinized in-depth: (1) activism and protest, (2) journalism and news media, (3) international negotiations, national policy, and local engagement, (4) art and cultural production, (5) climate obstruction and delay, and (6) communication effects on attitudes and behaviors. The review reveals, inter alia, a predominance of research originating from, and case studies focused on high-income countries, a strong reliance on qualitative methods, and a tendency to conceive of justice in terms of distributive rather than procedural or representational questions. In the authors' view, the review indicates a need for comparative research, quantitative studies, and a broader inclusion of perspectives from regions disproportionately affected by climate change—particularly from low- and middle-income countries. The authors call for a concerted effort to bridge the gap between activism and communication by emphasizing the critical role of justice-oriented communication in fostering a fair and rapid transition to a sustainable future.
  • Publication
    Climate change assemblies as spaces for the potential mitigation of climate policy misperceptions: A survey experiment
    (Elsevier, 2025-01-25) Suiter, Jane; Saude, Kevin; McNally, Brenda; European Union’s Horizon 2020
    Climate action stands as one of the paramount challenges in contemporary society. A significant impediment lies in the prevalence of misperceptions, notably the dissemination of narratives that either endorse climate policy delay or outright climate denial, often perpetuated by vested interests. The World Economic Forum, recognising the gravity of this issue, has underscored” misinformation and disinformation” as the preeminent global risk in the coming biennium, while the UN IPCC has stated that rampant disinformation is delaying climate action. Significantly, misinformation has been linked to climate misperceptions, for example, the belief in technological utopianism, for example, that climate change policies are ineffective and technological solutions will fix the problem in the future, which normalises acceptance of the status quo despite the urgent need for transformative actions. Recent scholarly literature posits that deliberative forums, commonly referred to as mini-publics, can contribute to mitigating such misperceptions while ensuring democratic legitimacy (Muradova et al. 2023) by informing the public. This paper contributes to the special issue on how Climate Change Assemblies (CAs) can contribute to reflexive environmental governance and help societies address the climate emergency, by exploring how CAs perform for the mitigation of climate policy misperceptions. In particular, we focus on whether communication about the procedural, aspects of citizen assemblies to the broader public emerges as a critical component. We understand these mechanisms to be contingent upon complex institutional dynamics, including mechanisms integral to their functioning such as the roles of representation, competence, and voice within assemblies. This empirical inquiry is situated within the framework of a survey experiment conducted across five European countries with varying climate policy salience and emissions levels. We find for most people reading about a climate citizens’ assembly makes little difference. We do find some minimal effects for the wider citizenry in general related to voice, although there are larger effects for some more sceptical cohorts, particularly for representation.