Page 50 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

3 Sustainability Communication: An Integrative Approach 33

development and everyone must be informed in order to be able to take part in societal
decision-making processes as responsible citizens. “The relation of science and
society has undergone a few noticeable shifts over the past decades. All of these
shifts are connected to a notion of democratisation” (Maasen 2009: 306).
The dissemination of scientific knowledge in public space is often described as a
linear communication model, with a strict division between science and the public
and with the public appearing as a passive and deficient addressee. Underlying this
understanding of communication is a hierarchical model of forms of knowledge
giving scientific knowledge a special position. Popularisation of scientific knowl-
edge is then a ‘top-down’ process of education and reduced to a process of transla-
tion. “The deficiency model which claims that the public has a blank mind to be
filled with scientific information and campaigns to promote the ‘public understand-
ing of science’ as a means to obtain greater support and acceptability, simply have
not worked to produce the desired outcome”. A clear shift of emphasis needs to take
place so that the public is recognised as democratic and actively expressing its inter-
ests and values concerning science (Maasen and Weingart 2005). Stehr speaks of
the ‘penetration of society with knowledge’ (Stehr 1994), meaning that science is
faced with a public that is itself increasingly scientifically trained. Continuing along
the same lines, Felt (2002) argues for ‘education through science’ and criticizes the
monopolistic position of scientific knowledge, demanding a ‘new form of dialog
culture’. In science communication the talk is of a ‘dialogic turn’, which is described
“as a new form of scientific governance based on dialogue, interaction and partici-
pation throughout the research process rather than the unidirectional knowledge
transfer of completed research results from researchers to policy-makers, practitio-
ners and members of the public” (Phillips 2009).
This shifting of perspective, i.e. the ‘disenchantment’ of the special position of
scientific knowledge, allows a new view of communication between science, the
media and other social functional areas. Because of the question about the percep-
tion and selection of different systems within the communication process, the dis-
course on scientific topics within this troika are not only interesting from a scientific
or media-sociological perspective. Against this background there would actually be,
according to Fischhoff (2007: 5), a need for more experts in order to have effective
science communication. “Creating scientifically sound communication requires
recruiting and coordinating three kinds of experts: domain scientists, to represent
the research about climate change and its effects; decision scientists, to identify the
information critical to specific choices; and social scientists, to identify barriers to
communicating that information and to create and evaluate attempts to overcome
those barriers. It also requires designers, to implement communication concepts in
sustainable ways”.
In the context of sustainability communication this new emphasis on the rela-
tionship between science and the public offers new insights. What role does sustain-
ability communication play in this mechanism of knowledge transfer? Does
sustainability communication create transition channels between these systems so
that knowledge diffuses between the public and science, leading to clear decisions
in the political system? Measures to achieve a sustainable development must be