Climate Conscious Relations in a Digital Urban Setting

2010

Climate change has challenged urban life, and as an omnipresent force, Nature sets the agenda for urban living. Using stakeholder theory to conceptualise urban life, we approach Nature as both an omnipresent stakeholder and an issue to be continuously addressed and related to. Adapting the stakeholder focus to relations, stakes and values, we conceptually analyse the digital installation entitled CO2mmitment/ CO2nfessions, which was a prominent part of the Aarhus CO2030 exhibition launching the vision of the Danish city of Aarhus to become carbon neutral by the year 2030. In the analysis, we explore how the citizen is framed and invited to enact his/her responsibilities to the natural environment in an urban setting and how the digital mediation facilitates various forms of relations and climate conscious positions, incorporating both narcissistic desires, universal anxiety, moral obligations, ethical virtue and image performance. Statements from the actual confessors/committers exemplify this. Thus, the paper provides insight into understanding the complexity of climate-conscious citizenship as a complex configuration of paradoxical, co-existing ethics and arguments.

2009

Studies of the city have been addressed from many different approaches such as law, political science, art history and public administration, in which the economic, political and legal status of the city have played a major role. However, a new agenda for conceptualizing the city has emerged, in which the city assumes new roles. By using stakeholder theory as a framework for conceptualizing the city, we argue that the city assumes a political-economic agenda-setting role as well as providing a stage for identity constructions and relational performances for consumers, organizations, the media, politicians and other stakeholders. Stakeholder theory allows us to conceptualize the city as being constituted by stakes and relationships between stakeholders which are approached from three analytical positions (modern, postmodern and hypermodern, respectively), thereby allowing us to grasp different stakes and types of relationships, ranging from functional and contractual relationships to individualized and emotionally driven or more non-committal and fluid forms of relationships. In order to support and illustrate the analytical potentials of our framework for conceptualizing urban living, we introduce a project which aims to turn the city of Aarhus into a CO2neutral city by the year 2030, entitled Aarhus CO2030. We conclude that applying stakeholder theory to a hyper-complex organization such as a city opens up for a reconceptualization of the city as a web of stakes and stakeholder relations. Stakeholder theory contributes to a nuanced and elaborate understanding of the urban complexity and web of both enforced and voluntary relationships as well as the different types of relationships that characterize urban life.

Global Environmental Change, 2011

Climate change is one of the most pressing sustainability issues of the modern era affecting individuals, organisations and societies. Climate change poses physical threats to our survival and challenges the way we view ourselves and the economic and political systems. Today, business organisations control substantial resources and knowledge and thus have a crucial role in addressing climate change. However, climate change is a complex issue with no commonly accepted standards and guidelines. This study is concerned with the dilemma that business organisations face when they are striving address climate change. This study contributes to previous literature on corporate sustainability and climate change by using discourse analysis to examine climate change engagement in business organisations. Business organisations and managers are vital leaders in providing solutions to sustainability challenges and therefore, examining their discursive constructions of climate change engagement is...

Climate change requires societal engagement on both mitigation and adaptation. With a growing majority of people living in cities, urban dwellers and municipal decision-makers will need to reduce their emissions and other impacts on the regional and global climate while dealing with the unavoidable near-term and potential longer-term impacts of climate change. To facilitate effective societal response to climate change, a busy, distracted, and so far only marginally interested public needs to be engaged on the topic. This poses significant challenges to communication and sustained outreach efforts. This letter draws on critical insights from a three-year multi-disciplinary project that involved academics and practitioners from various disciplines and sectors of (mostly US) society and explored how to communicate climate change in ways that facilitate societal response. The letter raises questions about key audiences, appropriate messengers, framings and messages, reception of climate change information, and the choice of communication mediums and formats to achieve different communication and engagement goals.

Environmental Communication-a Journal of Nature and Culture, 2009

Social Media and Online Brand Communities, 2015

The wave of new media technology is sweeping across the globe. Given its speed of information dissemination and retrieval, it is relevant to explore how it can be used to manage corporate-stakeholder relations, engagement, and communication. This is because communication is an effective medium for managing relations (and crisis). In the post-conflict era in Niger delta region of Nigeria that has been described as slipping into the abyss of renewed conflict and violence following perceived failure of the amnesty deal to drive change, it is crucial to rethink the instrumentality of the new media in bringing better corporate-community relations in the region. It is expected that this process will democratise stakeholder engagement and widen discursive space following the speed, method, and multiplicity of the platforms that new media affords. The author also hopes that arguments shared here will cause a rethink on the possibility of a sustainable future in post-conflict Niger delta through new media technology.

Ecology and society, 2024

Current post-carbon transition trajectories are primarily focused on external solutions, while citizens' inner lives and roles in collective transformation and system change processes are largely overlooked. To address this gap, this study aims to explore the potential role of citizens as active agents of change. Specifically, it examines how citizens perceive and address climate change, the factors that can empower and motivate them to act, and how they imagine future transformation pathways and their own role within them. Based on a combined SenseMaker and Grounded Theory methodology, we explore citizens' perspectives and discuss their implications for improving current approaches and discourses, such as lifestyle environmentalism and post-growth. Our findings provide important insights into the interplay between people's motivation, sense of agency, and social paradigms, with direct implications for policy and practice. They show that the materialistic growth paradigm under which most people act does not support motivation and engagement in sustainability transformations. Secondly, although intrinsic motivation, along with values such as care and community, increase engagement and transformation, they are seldom reflected in current policy approaches and discourses. Thirdly, a sense of agency is key for lasting individual and collective engagement. Put together, the results indicate that empowering individual and collective agency requires challenging current societal and systemic values that lie at the root of today's crises. Supporting conditions that allow the emergence of new social paradigms through targeted actions at individual, collective, and system levels is thus crucial to tackling climate change and meeting policy targets.

Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae, 2023

It needs to be clarified in the literature as to how humanism could embrace environmental ecosystems in cities and society. Some scholars argue that Stakeholder Theory could help bridge the environmental ecosystems under a humanist approach. For this reason, this study aims to fill this gap by exploring how Stakeholder Theory and Humanism can be connected to the fostering of sustainable development in cities and society. The main findings highlighted in the urban and societal contexts the role of stakeholder and humanist responsibility, the role of stakeholder consensus about humanist themes and environmental issues, and last but not least important, the need to consider the environment as a non-human stakeholder in social and urban governance. These directions should also be further detailed and explored in the multi/interdisciplinary fields of Sociology, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Humanities, Political Science, and Urban Studies. Therefore, this study provided a conceptual framework of three propositions which revealed that a stakeholder-oriented and humanism-oriented governance can embrace environmental concerns in cities and societies. In this way, consensus, responsibility, and considering the environment as a non-human stakeholder are critical elements in urban and social governance.

Frontiers in Communication

There is wide recognition that the dangers of climate change require urgent, large scale, and systemic changes (IPCC, 2018). There is also a growing awareness that these changes are not simply a question of carbon emissions and regulatory policies, but of democracy and societal transformation (e.g., Klein, 2014; Rasbash, 2019). In challenging the priority of the economic, regulatory, and technological solutions of an emissions paradigm, a diverse range of actors are centring questions of power, exclusion, and justice to recast climate change communication around the needs of societal transformation. The contemporary climate change movement is thus broader, more diverse, and more inventive than contemporary scholarship often suggests, reconfiguring climate action and climate communication as mutually interdependent. The epistemological, conceptual and analytical challenges that result from taking the diversity of these actions seriously is worth critical attention and study. Responding to these challenges, the Research Topic on Critical Approaches to Climate Change and Civic Action focuses on the communicative dimensions of contemporary forms of climate action. By viewing the meanings of climate change as defined in communication practices, we center the role of communication in imagining, shaping, facilitating, contesting and enacting collective action on climate change. In doing so, we situate communication as constitutive of the epistemological, discursive and material conditions necessary for creating societal transformations at a systemic level. While the field of climate change communication has moved beyond its ad hoc origins and is now informed by a wide array of disciplines, including psychology, political science, and neuroscience, the constitutive aspect of communication is often minimized or elided in this work. A constitutive approach to communication, as Ballentyne (2016) reminds us, is distinguished by its attention to the coproduction of discourse (or communication practices) and reality, and by an understanding of climate change as both physically and socially produced. It also encourages critical approaches to communication that are more open, inclusive, and responsive to the emplaced and embodied knowledges that animate the climate change movement. Our approach to this Research Topic has several features that follow from recognizing the constitutive element of communication. The articles engage in theoretical, empirical and critical reflection by situating communicative practices as constitutive of the relationships that make up our worlds. Articles in this collection are also critical in their attention to the questions of power and marginalization that invariably shape our understanding of climate change. "Critical," in this respect, does not mean sceptical or cynical toward climate science, but indicates an anti-essentialist engagement with the assumptions, norms, and inequalities in the systems of power that shape our collective futures. Questions of identity, meaning, interpretation, action, power, and human/ more-than-human relations are brought into the political foreground. Finally, the articles are inventive in allowing our concepts and epistemologies to be unsettled by events, and in resituating climate change communication with respect to wider visions and imaginaries of societal