Deliberative framing: opening up discussions for local-level public engagement on climate change
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Deliberative framing: opening up discussions for local-level public engagement on climate change Rebecca J. Romsdahl 1 Received: 23 July 2019 / Accepted: 20 May 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Impacts from climate change will significantly affect local governance, and efforts to develop adaptation and mitigation policies will require widespread public support. However, public engagement, and discussions of climate change, remains limited. A new approach to public engagement titled, deliberative framing, can help bridge political divides and provide opportunities to discover innovative policy options. This paper reviews deliberative democracy and framing where they have been applied to examine public engagement on climate change. Integrating insights from these fields can help develop a practice of deliberative framing for managing climate change mitigation and adaptation actions at local scales, to complement national and international efforts. This could assist with community-based agenda setting toward greater justice and the public good. Challenges include building capacity for reflexivity, communication, and public engagement among government actors, recognizing there are different ways to frame climate change and designing deliberative forums that are more inclusive of disparate groups and often underrepresented minorities. Keywords Deliberative democracy . Framing . Climate change . Public engagement . Local governance
1 Introduction As the success of global climate policy continues to be uncertain, lower levels of government, including states, provinces, and cities, have been leading mitigation and adaptation efforts (Bulkeley 2010; Jordan et al., 2015; Rabe, 2007; Rayner, 2010; Simon Rosenthal, Rosenthal, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-02002754-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Rebecca J. Romsdahl [email protected]
1
Earth System Science & Policy Department, University of North Dakota, 4149 University Avenue MS 9011, Grand Forks, ND 58201, USA
Climatic Change
Moore, & Smith, 2015). Additionally, devolution of responsibilities, such as natural resources and risks management, to lower levels of government has promoted an urgency for local and regional strategies to manage climate mitigation and adaptation efforts and attempts to develop sustainability policies. Cities around the world are providing leading examples of how to develop and implement local and regional climate policies. Part of this movement includes a growing demand for local deliberation opportunities (Fung 2015; Moser & Berzonsky, 2015). Government and non-government actors are organizing citizen forums to gather feedback on challenging issues, including climate change (Gastil and Levine 2005). Deliberative democracy theory and experiments show that deliberation at local levels of governance is important for bringing together diverse peoples and expertise and for discussing contentious values, especially
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