Climate change communication and public engagement in interpersonal deliberative settings: evidence from the Irish citizens’ assembly

Muradova, Lala, Walker, Hayley and Colli, Francesca (2020) Climate change communication and public engagement in interpersonal deliberative settings: evidence from the Irish citizens’ assembly. Climate Policy, 20 (10), 1322-1335. (doi:10.1080/14693062.2020.1777928).

Abstract

Citizens are being increasingly called upon to participate in climate change policymaking. Citizen assemblies have been proposed as a viable and effective way of boosting public support for ambitious climate policies. This study examines the varying effects of climate change communication on citizen support for the speaker’s policy proposals, in the framework of the most consequential citizen-centred experimentation in environmental policymaking to date – the Irish Citizens’ Assembly. Drawing on the six-principle framework for authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we test whether effective communication contributes to explaining outcomes of deliberation on climate change. Methodologically, we take a set-theoretic approach, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to operationalise conditions and analyse the data. Our findings show that effective communication does explain why certain policy proposals were adopted by the Irish Citizens’ Assembly over others, in conjunction with other conditions, such as having a high proportion of proposals being repeated by other speakers.

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Contributors

Author: Lala Muradova

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