Professor Jane Suiter has been awarded a prestigious Consolidator Laureate Award. The Project, COMDEL, Examining the Potential of Communicative Deliberation for Climate Action, IRCLA/2022/3896, runs from September 2022-August 2026.
COMDEL’s ambition is to advance frontier
research on the role of deliberation in addressing climate change.
Specifically, it aims to deliver new theoretical and empirical insights into
the capacity of deliberation to bridge communication and knowledge gaps between
climate scientists, citizens, media actors, and elite policymakers concerning
climate change. It is premised on the idea that finding ways to overcome these
gaps is essential in order to develop cohesive and collective climate action
and to combat widespread climate disinformation and vested interests. This
entails drawing together three distinct disciplines - deliberative democracy,
science communication, and political psychology–to advance a novel and
evidence-based understanding of effective democratic communication.
Heeding Boykoff’s (2019) call to “smarten
up” communications about climate change to match the demands of a
twenty-first-century communications environment, COMDEL will (a) be the first
comprehensive beyond state-of-the-art study that brings together the
multi-disciplinary literature on democratic innovations (specifically
transmission theory), misperception corrections, and climate change
communication, through a focus on the deliberative communication in the public
sphere between elites and citizens. (b) analyse the interventions within
deliberative systems that can inoculate citizens in both the mini and
maxi-public against climate change misperceptions. (c) study the dissemination
of denier and rebuttal narratives through platforms, mainstream media, and
parliamentary speech. (d) establish whether assemblies can help elites move
towards climate action and withstand lobbying and information campaigns from
vested interests. (e) build an innovative empirical and theoretical framework
for enabling deliberative communication across the public sphere, helping to
inoculate society against the worst pathogens of climate change disinformation.
In order to achieve its objectives using
the conceptual framework outlined above, COMDEL will use an array of
methodological approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, each of them
addressing a specific research question, for example, theory building,
conceptual mapping, experimentation, text mining and content analysis
(knowledge graphs).
