Page 48 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

3 Sustainability Communication: An Integrative Approach 31

in the classic sense consists of (as a rule scientific) experts educating laypeople, or
‘normal’ people, in order that they achieve some ‘insight into necessity’. The mean-
ing of this concept was expanded (similar to environmental communication) to a
general term for the permanently re-occurring communication about health and
environmental risks caused by humans – from printed warnings on cigarette boxes
to feature-length television shows on global climate change (Doulton and Brown
2009; Lundgren and McMakin 2009; Sonnett 2009).
From a scientific perspective there has always been a close relationship between
risk research and environmental research (Beck and Kropp 2007). Risk communica-
tion also has a political dimension – and so another similarity to environmental
communication. In the final analysis environmental policy can be understood as risk
management (Cox 2010). All measures in environmental policy are based on risk
assessment or at least assumptions about risk – whether they are oriented toward the
cooperation, precautionary or polluter-pays principle.
From a systems-theoretical perspective, society can be understood as a commu-
nication complex with a number of differentiated communicative contexts and so an
equal number of different risks that are created by societal risk communication on a
daily basis between such functional systems as politics and law, law and the econ-
omy and education and family. In such a perspective the societal dimension is how-
ever only one context that must be accounted for in risk communication. For a
comprehensive understanding of risk communication in a ‘poly-contextual risk
society’ the analytical framework needs to be expanded to handle both the problems
of decision-making in a temporal dimension and the issues of coping with complex-
ity in a factual dimension. Together these three horizons of meaning create the basic
context of risk communication, which at the same time must always be communica-
tively realised (Japp and Kusche 2008). This perspective also eliminates the radical
juxtaposition of experts and laypeople (Lorenzoni and Hulme 2009), replacing it
with a recognition of a plurality of potentially complementary forms of knowledge.
In addition technology and specialised knowledge are no longer considered a ‘neu-
tral’ enclave of objectivity, making risk conflicts and discussions about the validity
of scientific-technological knowledge the normal state (Juntti et al. 2009; McDonald
2009). Since mere information about risks diminishes the well-being of many indi-
viduals as well as their motivation to take action (Japp and Kusche 2008), risk com-
munication now attempts to highlight less the dangers and more the opportunities to
take action. If the opportunities to take action by participating actors are understood
as resources, then such a resource communication approach can show how indi-
vidual (personal resources) or collective (societal resources) competences to take
action can be developed and/or made use of. This counters the fear of losing control
in the face of environmental and health risks.
The media is, as with all of the approaches discussed here, of central impor-
tance (see Chap. 7). Media function as a very sensitive social alarm system or
seismograph, registering tremors in the environment and in society. However
“news [are] not an objective presentation of political reality, but an interpretation
of events and issues from the perspective of reporters, editors and selected sources”
(Wagner 2008: 27).