Public Engagement with Climate Change as Scientific Citizenship: A Case Study of World Wide Views on Global Warming

Abstract

World Wide Views (WWViews) is an innovative participatory methodology that scales up formal public engagement in response to global environmental issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. In September 2009, WWViews on Global Warming enrolled 4,400 lay participants from across 38 countries to discuss global climate policy. The most remarkable outcome was how consistently people from across different political regions and social groups called for a stringent global climate policy. Drawing on scientific citizenship as an analytic lens, this result is positioned, not as a straightforward input into global policy but as an output from a highly formalized process. What forms of citizenship are embodied, projected, and negotiated in WWViews? What are the implications of these tacit forms of citizenship for the types of epistemic agency that emerge as a result? WWViews participants were situated as consumers of scientific knowledge tasked with responding to a limited slate of policy options that they had no role in creating, vetting, or altering. WWViews also projected an image of the global citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity. Effectively tethering the epistemic capacities of its participants to dominant scientific meanings, WWViews offered limited opportunity for alternative issue-framings or perspectives to emerge. Organizers and researchers of formal public engagement should be attentive to the potential for these initiatives, once scaled up to the global, to impose scientistic issue-framings and correspondingly limited models of epistemic agency.

Key Words:

• public engagement
• scientific citizenship
• climate change
• World Wide Views

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (865-2008-0023).

Notes

1 Quote was taken from Teknologi-Radet: the online newsletter of the Danish Board of Technology. Accessed at http://www.tekno.dk/subpage.php3?article=1735&toppic=kategori11&language=uk (accessed online 15 September 2013).

2 Following the event, facilitators were asked to recount any critical incidents that took place. These were defined asimportant incidents occurring within the trajectory of discussions that might have shifted significantly the nature or direction of the discussions, provided a moment of illumination or clarification, or provided a disruption that might have created a significant challenge for the group.