Kia ora from Jess,
I am so excited to be launching the results of in depth research on How to talk about Community Planning for Climate Disruption.
Addressing climate disruption is an ever-present focus for me, both personally and professionally. Acting wisely for our long-term good makes so much damn sense. I know that what we need is bold action. I also know that we can absolutely do what is needed and that it will make a difference. This is a shared feeling for many of us working across local and central government, in NGOs, in our public and civic institutions, in research and in business.
The question is how do we talk about climate disruption in a way that really works to help people in the public understand and get our decision makers to see that people want them to embrace that bold and necessary and wise action that we need?
For the past three years, our team at The Workshop has been seeking to answer this question on behalf of Auckland Council. Led by Dr Minette Hillyer and Ellen Ozarka, we have investigated how framing can help our communities understand and engage with a key action that is an important part of the climate solutions puzzle: community planning for climate disruption.
What we did
We are an organisation that combines cognitive and social science with strategic framing and communications expertise. This combination is important because we want people to be confident that the strategic framing advice we give will actually work to help you achieve your goals.
In this research, we sought to understand how people are thinking and reasoning about climate disruption and the community solutions that people across the local government terrain are working hard to implement. Importantly, these solutions involve coming together in communities to understand the impacts of climate disruption on the places we love and then deciding, with support, what to do next to protect people and places in the best ways we know how.
Understanding how people are thinking and reasoning about the issue tells us what shared mental models or cultural assumptions are going to get in the way of people hearing and responding to our current communications. It helps us identify the shared cultural assumptions that are going to open a door to people hearing and responding to our frames and communications.
Once we understood the landscape of public thinking as well as what experts need people to understand and do, we tested potential frames and messages in focus groups and representative surveys. We can see what works to build understanding in climate disruption and community planning, to increase people’s confidence that we have solutions that work and to strengthen their intention to take part.
Three key insights and related recommendations
There are a number of recommendations and frames to use, but three stand out as critical to approaching how we communicate.
1. People do not have a mental model for community and civic action
We found that people struggle to bring to mind what community and civic action looks like, what problem it is trying to solve, what their roles might be and what the government’s role is. In cognitive science terms, it means people’s brains do not have existing neural networks that help them quickly envision community action. This explains why we found that people’s experiences of climate-related events did not lead them to think about and engage in actions at the community or civic level – they don’t know what they don’t know.
Try building the public’s mental model about civic and community action
Shift from ‘I’ action to ‘we’ action. Move from talking about individual-level choices and actions (preparing emergency kits, choosing to recycle) towards explaining and describing what community and civic action looks and feels like. Give concrete examples – for example, citizen juries or how iwi and hapū have collectively decided how to care for special places for years.
Show don’t tell. Give people the experience of taking part in civic and community action to build those experiences and the neural networks that experience creates.
Explain rather than describe or assert. Don’t just tell people to do community planning. Use simple explanatory frames to help them understand what it is, what their role is and what the council’s role is. Try the journey planning metaphor we tested.
2. People understand the risk – leading communications with it frightens them out of collective action
People care immensely about climate but they feel fatalistic and scared. You don’t need to spend time convincing them it is real or that it is a serious risk or that we “are running out of time.” Fear lifts our thinking caps off. Fatalism demotivates us and makes everything seem too hard. While risk is the water many experts swim in, it is not the frame to lead communications with the public if we want to build curiosity, confidence and engagement with the solutions that work.
Try connecting people to climate action through opportunities for better lives
Listen to people about the types of lives they live, the things that really motivate them in terms of our collective wellbeing. People told us how they wanted to live in more connected and caring communities after their experiences of climate-related events. A lot of new research shows how climate action will help us live these happier, healthier, more just lives. Talk about these opportunities.
Connect people to climate action and solutions – lead communication with these values and motivations that many people hold.
Use a solutions frame – focus on climate action and community planning as bold, necessary and doable. This ‘can do’ tone helps overcome fear and fatalism.
3. People don’t want to be told how to change their behaviour to solve climate disruption – it feels unjust and futile
People told us they wanted to see people in government, industry, business and other powerful institutions take responsibility to act on climate disruption because they weren’t doing that. People get especially riled up when they are told how to shift their individual behaviour – take public transport, clean your gutters …
People found it especially hard to see what people in local government were doing. This is in part because of a strong framing of local government as “roads, rates and rubbish”. Frequent use of consumer framing – referring to them as ratepayers and consumers – has people thinking about council as a service provider not a civic institution. Yet planning for and providing climate solutions is a core part of local government’s responsibility to current and future generations – and it is work that they are doing. People told us, if this was true, they would like to be part of that! Good news then!
Try framing the actions that those with more power and resources are taking to make climate-supportive actions the easiest ones
Put yourself in stories about climate action and community planning. Talk less about “what you should be doing” and more about “what we are doing to support you”.
Use case studies and concrete examples to show what your organisation is doing to provide people with options to engage in climate action and community planning.
Accessing the research and recommendations
We’ve published the results of this in-depth research in a Framing Report supported by an applied Framing and Messaging Guide.
I’ll be launching the report and framing guide in a free talk on 16 October at 12pm. Please join me on Zoom to hear more about the research and the recommendations you can start using straight away to build engagement and understanding. You can register using this link.
I encourage you to share this research and the recommendations with other dedicated people working hard in this space – narratives and frames shift when we use them together.
Ngā mihi
Jess