Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust

Abstract

This article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are often opposed to potential policy solutions. There are also people, however, who do not even believe in some of the problems—most notably climate change. This scepticism is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of their preferring free markets to regulation; in other ways, though, the sceptics are not at all sympathetic to free markets. What appears more distinctive about them is their distrust of virtually all elite social institutions, including communities of experts, and a corresponding divide between their beliefs and preferences and those of experts generally.

The belief that politics drive scientific research & its impact on COVID-19 risk assessment

“…Public perceptions that scientific research is politically motivated emanates from several sources. Most notably, politicians and media can fuel these perceptions by i) presenting partial or misleading accounts of scientific methods and findings to legitimize political agendas and ii) discrediting scientists with accusations of collusion with political interests (e.g., "Big Pharma") [7,8,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. For instance, President Trump claimed that the Food and Drug Administration was intentionally delaying COVID-19 drug trials to hurt his reelection: "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics" [20].…”

Four agendas for research and policy on emissions mitigation and well-being

“…Existing technology now makes it feasible to achieve low carbon emissions and high human well-being for all nations (Grubler et al ., 2018). But the barriers are substantial, and include active lobbying against regulation by vested interests (InfluenceMap 2019; Moe 2015), technological and social lock-in (Ivanova et al ., 2018), and, despite growing awareness, a fragile public discourse on appropriate responses to climate change (Drews & van den Bergh, 2016; Fairbrother, 2017). Such barriers are differentiated by country and world region, and even within nations.…”

Untapped Potential of Citizen Science in Mexican Small-Scale Fisheries

“…At a time when the ivory tower of scientists is threatened by an increasing distrust in experts (Fairbrother, 2017;Lamberts, 2017), and crucial environmental topics such as climate change pass from the scientific to the political realm, citizen involvement in scientific research becomes ever more important. The stakeholders covered in this paper have made adaptive management decisions at the local level, as suggested by Aceves-Bueno et al (2015), as fisheries science, generated in data-poor fishers, at the local scale and on topics of interest for the fishers, is trusted by the fishers.…”