Environmental communication, from engagement to action: lessons from interviews with environmental experts, Hungary

Abstract

Modern societies have loose ties to nature, environmental processes and problems remain mostly invisible to our eyes. This paper investigates environmental experts’ motivations, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs in relation to environmental communication and their practice in promoting changes in people’s environmental behavior via fifteen in-depth interviews from Hungary. The interviews reveal the potential for establishing human-nature connectedness in childhood or through field encounters, faith, but reflect the ambiguous nature of fear appeal in environmental communication. Many barriers hinder communication, such as inadequate messaging, social inability and defense mechanisms that could be overcome by using examples and policies close to people. The answers given in interviews suggest that grassroots initiatives are not satisfactory, yet an engaged society can influence decision-makers to strengthen the aims with top-down regulations.

Keywords:

• Environmental behavior change
• pro-environmental behavior
• engagement
• motivation
• barriers
• inaction
• experts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Priszcilla Hafenscher: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Interview survey, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing

Ferenc Jankó: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing

Additional information

Funding

The authors are very grateful for the four anonymous reviewers for their valuable help by improving the earlier drafts of the paper. This work was supported by the Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of sciences as well as ÚNKP-21-5 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology from the source of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (Ferenc Jankó). The founding source had no involvement in the conduct of the research and preparation of the article.

Notes on contributors

Priszcilla Hafenscher

Priszcilla Hafenscher (MSc in Biology) is a PhD student in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at the Eötvös Loránd University, who plans on pursuing a doctoral degree in climate change communication. Her research interests include human environment interactions and media representation of the environment.

Ferenc Jankó

Ferenc Jankó is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and at the Institute of Ecological Economics of the University of Sopron. His research focuses on scientific knowledge controversies as well as public debates related to environmental change and conflicts, and especially climate change. Relatedly, he conducted research in climate change adaptation and communication. As a second post-doc research topic, he is dealing with the issue of the history of geographical knowledge making in Burgenland, Austria.