“Do the Right Thing”: Information-Deficit Model Logics and Creative (Climate) Communications

• In Event: How Has Climate Change Reshaped Scientific Expertise and the Expert? - II

Abstract

In this paper, I interrogate how and why the persistence of the ‘information-deficit model of communication’ stands in the way of more effective 21st century climate engagements. This is animated by considerations of how dissent from climate contrarian (or ‘denier’) voices persist and find traction. I argue that dominant information-deficit model approaches counterproductively provide oxygen that breathe more life into counter-productive claims. Over many years, research – from Science and Technology Studies in particular –has provided evidence that the informational-deficit model of communication does not accurately represent how communications actually function. Efficacy of climate countermovement (CCM) organizations in the public arena can be attributed in part to their exploitation of the dominant information-deficit model. This has effectively helped contrarians to find traction in battles for public understanding and engagement about the causes and consequences of climate change. While some point to the CCM organizations and connected individuals as the fossils of climate science, politics and policy, the fossils among us are those who fail to note that their strength is derived in part from our collective adherence merely to information-deficit communications. Moving from deficit model logic and toward a more interactive, conversational and Latourian ‘normative theory of expertise’ model forces a movement away from talking past one another and toward listening to one another through enhanced understanding of burden sharing. This expanded approach can then more capably suffocate the efficacy of outlier assertions. This set of considerations is nested (as Chapter 3) in a larger 2019 book entitled ‘Creative (Climate) Communications’.

Author

• Maxwell Boykoff, University of Colorado Boulder