Fostering environmental citizenship through public deliberation: Investigating Canadian participant perspectives from the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative
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2014-04-30
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Abstract
Drawing on the deliberative turn in environmental governance, green political theorists have put forward public participation, particularly events involving dialogue and deliberation, as a way to foster “environmental citizenship”. They argue, for example, that through participation individuals acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to reflect on environmental problems; gain more appreciation for “nature” and humans’ interconnectedness with the natural world; become more attuned to the collective good over individual interests in coming up with policy solutions; and, become more motivated to take future action on environmental issues. However, very little empirical research has examined this contention in practice and it remains an open question as to whether and how deliberation fosters environmental citizenship, and in what forms. This thesis aims to close that gap through an empirical case study of the Canadian arm of a global public consultation process called “World Wide Views on Global Warming” (WWViews) that involved more than 4000 citizens across 38 countries. Positioning participatory initiatives as “experiments in citizenship” (Luque, 2005), it explores how Canadian participants understood themselves, and others, as environmental citizens, and how these perceptions shifted as a result of participating in WWViews.
Through a set of 28 semi-structured interviews six to seven months post-WWViews and survey responses before and immediately after the event, the analysis identifies a range of environmental citizenships among participants, contingent on different notions of climate governance, the citizen’s expected relation to the state, and interpretations of the issue of climate change itself. Predominant within the analysis is the influence of dominant climate discourses, both within and beyond the consultation setting (e.g. the science-focused discourse prevalent at UN-level negotiations or the climate skeptic discourse seen in mass media coverage), on how participants understood themselves to be environmental citizens. In particular, ambivalence and/or scepticism over the nature of climate change was far-reaching among WWViews Canada participants, influencing how they perceived interactions with fellow participants, how they assessed the success of the consultation event itself, and what actions they deemed most appropriate for environmental citizens to take moving forward.
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Environmental Sciences
Citation
Medlock, J. E. (2014). Fostering environmental citizenship through public deliberation: Investigating Canadian participant perspectives from the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26217