Environmental Communication

At the Division of Environmental Communication, a diverse team with roots in political sciences, sociology, geography, science and technology studies and social psychology investigates the communication challenges associated to environmental and sustainability issues.

We consider communication as the joint construction of meaning, and conduct primarily qualitative social science research concerned with themes such as legitimacy, participation, power, resistance, conflict and learning in decision making and transformation processes.

Traditionally, environmental communication has often been understood from an instrumental perspective that focuses on the transmission of information, rather than considering communication as the social negotiation of knowledge, values, emotions and embodied experiences. Through our work, we aim to promote such a broader and more nuanced understanding of communication in research, policy and practice.

Our research spans a wide range of contexts such as:

• forestry,
• food production,
• nature conservation,
• climate change,
• wildlife management, and
• urban planning. 

Much of our work combines micro-perspectives, zooming in on practices of meaning-making between individuals and groups, with macro-perspectives that scrutinize societal structures that shape these practices.

Our research thus often involves observation and interviews with individual actors – for example, farmers, public agency staff or journalists – but also an analysis of the societal norms, communicative expectations and materialities that guide their actions.

We work closely with practitioners, including public agencies, NGOs and industry, to help improve processes of public participation and collaboration. Ongoing work in close cooperation with other societal actors investigates, for example, the processes through which trust, but also distrust are constructed and performed in dialogue processes as part of natural resource governance arrangements.

Our research critically examines the potential, risks and limitations of emerging forms and infrastructures of communication, such as online platforms and AI – but also of storytelling, the age-old approach to communication that is in many contexts being promoted to inspire new ways of meaning-making about sustainability. Other work investigates political discourse at levels from the supra-national to the local. It aims to understand how societal change is produced or, conversely, stopped, how polarization is made and prevented, and how constructive debate about societal values, goals and visions can be encouraged.