Communication for Development and Social Change and the Challenge of Climate Change

"In short, to catalyze a sense of ecological responsibility, communication's role should center on what multiple actors can do together to understand and engage the risks of global warming and be exercised through a sense of local action built on voice, participation, and trust."

High-density cities with poor infrastructures, low-lying zones susceptible to flooding or rising seas, and dry places already vulnerable to drought are most vulnerable to climate change. This article argues that, as a field, communication for development and social change (CDSC) has a vested interest and a necessary role to play in how populations in developing countries learn about, negotiate, and understand climate change and how they can anticipate and increase their resilience in the face of its many effects.

To help inform this role, Patrick D. Murphy and Tracy Mwaka Tinga suggest:

1. that CDSC should be aware of its overlap with environmentalism in terms of assumptions about who or what has the power to act (agency), in that both look through the lens of concepts such as power, governance, voice, community, rights, and cultural knowledge;
2. that CDSC must be informed by past research about what citizens in the global South know about climate change and how awareness impacts action; and
3. that scholars should be guided by the lessons from past climate-change-focused CDSC initiatives. As an example, the article explores a multi-stakeholder campaign that used music to educate Kenyan youth on climate change and help them be heard by Kenyan policymakers.

The first point of analysis concerns environmental discourses and agency. Murphy and Tinga argue that CDSC theorists and practitioners must look at how different problem-solving Earth discourses present certain assumptions about environmental stewardship. Big-picture environmental discourses may run the risk of putting people in passive roles - downplaying their agency and engagement by, for example, reducing policy making to technocratic, expert-led decision making. But there are alternative discourses that present problem-solving–driven visions for the care and treatment of the Earth. Specifically:

• Sustainable development focuses on growth, cooperation, global exchange, and distributive justice;
• Democratic pragmatism emphasises public consultation and ecological citizenship; and
• Green radicalism values local/non-Western knowledge and environmental justice.

By understanding how these discourses conceive of environmental agency and responsibility, the field of CDSC can establish a better sense of how the problem of climate change can be communicated to shape action, and in whose interest. CDSC presumes that project beneficiaries should actively participate in addressing their own social issues due to their possession of important cultural knowledge. Thus, in communicating about climate change, CDSC could facilitate a human-centred approach, where participation and communication support the exchange of ideas between communities and other stakeholders by documenting, sharing, and understanding local knowledge (e.g., cultural memory) in relation to institutional knowledge (e.g., climate science). Recent environmental communication scholarship has asserted the need to politicise climate change by shifting the focus from public awareness to political engagement - a task that, given its valuation of public consultation and citizen action, CDSC theory and practice are well positioned to take on.

Second, as explored here, if climate change CDSC is driven by a desire to engage marginalised groups so that it no longer remains the exclusive domain of experts and elites, it is important to look at what people around the world already know about climate change and how awareness impacts action. For example, the BBC Media Action's Climate Asia study (see also Related Summaries, below) asked: What are people's barriers to action, and in what ways can communication overcome those barriers and encourage action? Conducted from 2012 to 2013, Climate Asia involved surveys of 33,500 people, in-depth interviews with households and opinion leaders, and community assessment meetings. The study produced country reports (China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan), which outline 5 segment profiles that represent the extent to which people perceive impacts and are taking action to respond to them. The results of the study can shape CDSC practitioners as they work to move audiences from the realm of passive (e.g., the profiles of "surviving", "struggling", or "unaffected") to the more active categories of ecological citizenship ("adapting" and "willing"). Some of the insights to emerge from Climate Action relate to:

• participants' desire to get better information through trusted channels to help guide their action;
• the need for community participation in the communication process;
• the need for individuals to understand their own impact on the environment; and
• the need to coordinate with other actors (e.g., non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to amplify messages and show support.

Third, to support the claim that CDSC should be informed by lessons from past climate change-driven initiatives to learn how to move citizens to action, the article looks at one Kenyan campaign that used hip-hop, among other strategies, to engage young people. To make this happen, in preparation for the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as the Copenhagen Summit), the Kenya Climate Change Working Group (KCCWG) launched the Road to COP Taskforce. In the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit, the group created "Rauka ama Hatutasurvive" (Wake up or we won't survive) to engage Kenyan citizens as active social agents in the fight against global warming. Sponsored by Oxfam and Norwegian Church Aid, the campaign was stakeholder based and sought to engage and resonate with vulnerable communities on multiple levels:

• At the centre of the campaign's youth outreach efforts was Juliani, a national celebrity associated with elements of green radicalism - social inequality, poverty, and activism - who served as the face and voice of the campaign. The popular hip-hop artist wrote the "Rauka" song, which used language the audience could understand and featured a mix of entertainment (the beat and the tune) and education (with the message embedded in the lyrics). In the song, "The artist questions the lack of civic engagement among young people, who, despite being the group that will be most impacted by the long-term effects of global warming, largely remain in the background as policy makers implement actions without their input." In that way, its words were designed to inspire self-reflexive action anchored in local realities but connected to a global understanding of the problem. In addition to the song's rotation on community and commercial radio, its broadcast on television as a music video, and its spreadability through social media and mobile media devices, it was performed at free concerts.
• The campaign's organisational structure was enmeshed in the multistakeholder model of sustainable development, because the KCCWG was a collaboration of civil society groups, artists, external donors, and government agencies interested in addressing climate change and promoting climate justice.
• Conceptualised in the context of the Copenhagen Summit and the need to ensure that local voices were heard, the campaign included engaging communities in different parts of Kenya in climate hearings as well as a series of breakfast meetings with policymakers. Communities were encouraged not only to share their experiences with climate change but also to present ideas about what might be done to mitigate its effects. These activities suggest a link with the discourse of democratic pragmatism in its concern with how state and private sectors can approach environmental problem solving through public consultation.

Murphy and Tinga assert that, "Overall, the Rauka campaign suggests not only how Earth discourses can shape and frame the politics of climate change, even in the context of a single, regionalized campaign, but how stakeholder-centered CDSC strategies might move audiences from feeling uninformed, helpless, or excluded (e.g., what the BBC Media Action Climate Asia report labeled the surviving, struggling, and unaffected segments) to feeling connected, informed, and even empowered (Climate Asia's adapting and willing segments). Indeed, as our analysis of the Rauka campaign demonstrates, agency can be articulated on multiple discursive planes (shared, community, institutional, individual) even within one campaign, suggesting that CDSC initiatives can work on multiple discursive levels concurrently."

Continuing, with regard to what they call "the defining global problem of the 21st century" - anthropogenic climate change - they conclude: "Indeed, given its rich history and commitment to social equality, CDSC has an obligation to lead communication scholarship in the study of how this most pressing challenge can be confronted."