Dawud Ansari, Regine Schönenberg, Melissa Abud, Laura Becerra, Wassim Brahim, Javier Castiblanco, Anne C de la Veiga-Leinert, Nigel Dudley, Michael Dunlop, Carolina Figueroa, Oscar Guevara, Philipp Hauser, Hannes Hobbie, Mostafa AR Hossain, Jean Hugé, Luc Janssens de Bisthoven, Hilde Keunen, Claudia Munera-Roldan, Jan Petzold, Anne-Julie Rochette, Matthew Schmidt, Charlotte Schumann, Sayanti Sengupta, Susanne Stoll-Kleemann, Lorrae van Kerkhoff, Maarten PM Vanhove, and Carina Wyborn (2023)
Communicating climate change and biodiversity loss with local populations: exploring communicative utopias in eight transdisciplinary case studies
UCL Open Environment, 5.
Climate change and biodiversity loss trigger policies targeting and impacting local communities worldwide. However, research and policy implementation often fail to sufficiently consider community responses and to involve them. We present the results of a collective self-assessment exercise for eight case studies of communications with regard to climate change or biodiversity loss between project teams and local communities. We develop eight indicators of good stakeholder communication, reflecting the scope of Verran’s (2002) concept of postcolonial moments as a communicative utopia. We demonstrate that applying our indicators can enhance communication and enable community responses. However, we discover a divergence between timing, complexity and (introspective) effort. Three cases qualify for postcolonial moments, but scrutinising power relations and genuine knowledge co-production remain rare. While we verify the potency of various instruments for deconstructing science, their sophistication cannot substitute trust building and epistemic/transdisciplinary awareness. Lastly, we consider that reforming inadequate funding policies helps improving the work in and with local communities.
transdisciplinary communication, climate change, biodiversity loss, knowledge co-production, postcolonial moments, local communities
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