Reception of climate activist messages by low-carbon transition actors: argument evasion in the carbon offsetting debate

Abstract

How do adherents to hegemonic discourses construe and respond to radical arguments by activists? To address the question, we examined how adherents to hegemonic climate change discourses react to a climate activist’s arguments. In interviews conducted with corporate actors of low-carbon transitions, we used a video excerpt to elicit critical reactions to an activist’s argumentation on carbon offsetting. We used the critical reactions as an index of interviewees’ reception of the activist’s case and pragma-dialectical theory to analyze them. We found that interviewees advanced four types of criticism concerning individual agency, awareness-raising, neutralization, and financial instruments. We discuss their inter-relations and how interviewees construed the activist’s argumentation in ways that evaded his more antagonistic claims.

Keywords:

• Activist discourse
• argument reception
• frame contraction
• evasion strategies
• carbon offsetting

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank our colleague Dr. Dima Mohammed, who provided comments to an earlier version of this paper, as well as our reviewers and the journal’s editor for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the broader comparative study conducted in 2017-2018, Portugal and Turkey were taken as two geographically similar, institutionally different cases. In this study, we assume the elicitation task responses as arising in the framework of the global governance regime, where offsets are legitimated and used.

2 Interviewees viewed the first 70 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk9Ev91jjQ8

3 We conducted a total of 48 interviews but excluded 11 from the analysis for different reasons such as lack of sufficient English comprehension and apparent complete agreement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) under Grant Nr. TUBITAK-0010-2014.

Notes on contributors

Mehmet Ali Üzelgün

Mehmet Ali Üzelgün (PhD, University Institute of Lisbon) is an integrated member of Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon. He also serves as an invited assistant professor at the Munazara and Argumentation Ethics Research Center, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. His research explores various rhetorical and representational aspects of environmental discourse and communication. In the last years his work has focused particularly on climate change controversies from epistemic, political, and policy perspectives, and using the tools of argumentation theory.

Maria Fernandes-Jesus

Maria Fernandes-Jesus (PhD, University of Porto) is currently a research fellow at the York St John University, UK. She is also an associate researcher at the Center for Social Research and Intervention at ISCTE-IUL, Portugal. She has been particularly interested in understanding how and in which conditions excluded and marginalized groups and communities engage in sustained participation and collective action. She has experience in interdisciplinary and mixed-method research in the field of youth participation, community-based initiatives, political engagement with climate change, mutual aid and solidarity, climate activism and social movements.

Önder Küçükural

Önder Küçükural is an assistant professor at the Alliance of Civilizations Institute. He received his PhD in Sabanci University, Political Science Program. His research interests include argumentation and reasoning, religiosity, discourse analysis, ecology, and gender studies. He offers graduate-level courses at Alliance of Civilisations Institute on discourse analysis and argumentation, political sociology, ecology, and research methods.