Research Communication on Climate Change through Open Letters: Uniting Cognition, Affect and Action by Affective Alignments

Graminius, Carin

doi:10.1080/09505431.2022.2049597

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The several open letters signed by the groups of researchers did not receive major coverage; within the narratives, their importance was restricted to bringing out the contradiction without leading to much further debate. The results call for further study of scientists’ open letters, which could be interpreted, for example, as an avenue to illuminate politicians’ practices wherein scientific knowledge is selectively used to advance political agendas, or even as signs of a novel ‘social contract between science and civil society’ (Graminius 2022: 20). As the most prevalent narrative simply disregards the arguments raised by the open letters, they remain mostly on the margins of the coverage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal commitments versus actual practices? Narratives as tools of epistemic governance in the debate over Finnish forestry

Sivonen

Syväterä

2022

Acta Sociologica

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Nation states often end up adopting practices that are incongruent with their formal commitments to international efforts, such as mitigation of climate change. Although the necessity of a transfer towards carbon-neutral societies is widely understood, such decoupling is a challenge to transition. This study analyses the political discourse in the Finnish media from 2017 to 2018 around the European Union's Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation. The discourse embodies a contradiction, as the Finnish government sought to justify its aim to log a record amount of forest while officially pledging to climate change mitigation. The forest industry and the government launched a major lobbying campaign to influence the regulation calculations to be adopted by the European Union. Several representatives of the scientific community rose to oppose the government's plan of action by distributing scientific knowledge on the negative climate effects caused by extensive forestry; a vigorous public debate around the correct ways to use this natural resource ensued. Our analysis identifies three prevailing narratives, each portraying and resolving the contradiction in a distinct way. We argue that narratives work as tools of epistemic governance and demonstrate how policy actors selectively weave scientific knowledge into such narratives.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%