WIREs Climate Change 2018: An editorial essay

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Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees of separation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies). Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should be addressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitative studies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter. We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on science communication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate change and its future role in social life. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries

Pearce

Niederer

Özkula

et al. 2018

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164

“…The objective of this Advanced Review is to carry out an "issue review" that assesses the impact and legacy of Climategate on public debate over climate change (Hulme, 2018). To obtain relevant literature, we used a two-pronged strategy.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning the lessons of Climategate: A cosmopolitan moment in the public life of climate science

Raman

Pearce

2020

A decade after Climategate, climate change may be established as a social fact, yet the after‐effects live on. This Advanced Review assesses the impact of Climategate on public talk about climate change in the last decade. Reviewing academic articles, blogs, reports, books, and media articles, we identify three norms that set the foundations for Climategate to be seen as a scandal: (a) using scientific consensus to justify climate policy; (b) that openness is fundamental to validating scientific knowledge; (c) that the public was conceived as passive recipients of scientific knowledge rather than participants in dialogue. We then review developments since Climategate, that have seen some groups attempting to shore up these norms, while others have seen an opportunity to change the boundaries of public engagement around climate science. We describe this as a cosmopolitan moment in the public life of science: an opportunity to forge a public culture comfortable with the epistemic diversity and ambiguity inherent to climate change, and yet a culture that can also reason together in the public good. Finally, we assess the implications of Climategate's mixed legacy on contemporary climate change debates, emphasizing that cosmopolitan knowledge provides a means to craft effective, open, and fruitful approaches to public engagement around climate change. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

“…We wanted to execute a systematic search that traverses these literatures, uncovers commonalities across publications, and discerns if this constitutes an emerging scholarship. To achieve this aim, a SLR is an ideal approach, where "findings from many disparate studies [can be] synthesised in a (semi-)formal manner, […] through a meta-analysis of a defined corpus of work" (Hulme, 2018). Second, a SLR provided methodological transparency and rigor in our search, building on previous systematic review work, including in the field of climate change adaptation (Berrang-Ford et al, 2015).…”

Section: The Systematic Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond rules: How institutional cultures and climate governance interact

Bremer

Glavovic

Meisch

et al. 2021

Institutions have a central role in climate change governance. But while there is a flourishing literature on institutions' formal rules, processes, and organizational forms, scholars lament a relative lack of attention to institutions' informal side; their cultures. It is important to study institutions' cultures because it is through culture that people relate to institutional norms and rules in taking climate action. This review uncovers what work has been done on institutional cultures and climate change, discerns common themes around which this scholarship coheres, and advances and argument for why institutional cultures matter. We employed a systematic literature review to assemble a set of 54 articles with a shared concern for how climate change and institutional cultures concurrently affect each other. The articles provided evidence of a nascent field, emerging over the past 5–10 years and fragmented across literatures. This field draws on diverse concepts of institutionalism for revealing quite different expressions of culture, and is mostly grounded in empirical studies. These disparate studies compellingly demonstrate, from different perspectives, that institutional cultures do indeed matter for implementing climate governance. Indeed, the articles converge in providing empirical evidence of eight key sites of interaction between climate change and institutional cultures: worldviews, values, logics, gender, risk acceptance, objects, power, and relationality. These eight sites are important foci for examining and effecting changes to institutions and their cultures; showing how institutional cultures shape responses to climate change, and how climate change shapes institutional cultures. This article is categorized under: The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice