Public Discourses of Climate Change in Hong Kong

Abstract

The changing political environment in Hong Kong is likely to accelerate the transition in environmental policy discourse. Opportunities for critical public involvement are increasing and new environmental discourses are emerging. Yet, previous social surveys did not explore the range of these discourses and few focused on climate change. The paper outlines the public discourses of climate change in Hong Kong. Using Q-methodology, four distinctive discourses were identified, namely Pure Environmentalism, Political Pragmatism, Popular Optimism, and Fair Rationalism. While the first one is climate-centric, the other three are political or social in nature and do not indicate a clear or coherent climate orientation. This suggests that the climate change concern of the Hong Kong public is not tightly embedded into a coherent narrative of social and institutional transformation. Effective climate change governance and policies require strengthening the link between such concern and the public desires for social and institutional transformation. Bringing together the ongoing social movements and environmental campaigns will be instrumental to nurture an active climate citizenry.

Key Words:

• environmental discourse
• climate change
• public perception
• environmental governance
• Q-methodology
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express gratitude to the 50 participants of the Q-survey. This study was funded by the Griffith Climate Change Response Program at Griffith University. Survey fieldwork was undertaken by the Centre for the Advancement of Social Sciences Research of the Hong Kong Baptist University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2015.1040545.

Notes

1. Both PCA and Centroid Factor Analysis are acceptable methods for Q-analysis, although the latter is advocated by Stephenson (1953) and Brown (1980). PCA is statistically more precise than Centroid and has the advantage of being able to account for the commonality among Q sorts as well as the specificity of individual sorts (Webler et al., 2009).

2. In this paper, the term ‘climate change’ is used interchangeably with ‘global warming’, although they differ from each other in some aspects (see Whitmarsh, 2009).