Approaches to Communicating for a Sustainable Future

And we end this very diverse and, given the weather, frankly very draining IAMCR 2023 with a closing keynote by Annika Egan Sjölander. She begins by reminding us of the theme of this conference, ‘Inhabiting the Planet’: how does media and communication scholarship contribute to this aim, especially in what we, and future generations of scholars, do next? How do we work towards the common good?

Annika is a scholar from Sweden, but also works in the Global South; she is based in a marginal region, in the Arctic Circle, and on Sápmi land, in a region which climate change is already transforming – all this provides context and positionality to her talk. The focus of her work is on the role that communication has in transforming our societies to become more sustainable. But ‘communication’ itself is an empty signifier: it has multiple unfixed meanings, just like ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’ and, indeed, ‘sustainability’.

Communication for sustainability means that we need to urgently develop more ways to communicate in support of sustainability; this requires complex understandings and solutions, and the management of uncertainty. An imperfect example of such communication is the UN’s Agenda 2030, a flawed and contradictory document resulting from a process of compromise, but one which can nonetheless serve as a rallying point for actors working towards sustainability and innovation.

Innovation is as much a social as a technological task; we often already have technical solutions, but these still need to be disseminated and accepted at the social level. There is no easy recipe to follow for the move towards sustainable transformation and social innovation, but media and communication must play a central role in the process. Similarly, local and contextual factors always have a role to play in translating available solutions to specific settings.

But communication also must be envisioned in global terms, and it is the interplay between the local and the global that is the key to understanding what the digital has meant to environmental communication, for instance. We must maintain a critical perspective towards such technologies, of course, but also utilise them for our own purposes.

Many of the challenges we now face are unintended consequences of wealth creation, and are problems of the commons that require new approaches to coordination and government, and new forms of journalist and citizen dialogues. Journalism as an institution should represent a part of the commons that we fail to value sufficiently; considering the challenges that especially public service media now experience, we may not realise the significance of this kind of journalistic work until it is gone. But without it, we may not even be aware of many of the environmental problems we currently face.

Annika now points to the work of Carolyn Merchant, as a scholar who at an early stage highlighted the environmental crisis and the role of humanity in it, and more recently also explored the role of humanities scholarship in confronting these challenges. The Anthropocene is now our twentyfirst-century nightmare, altering what it means to be human itself. The biggest burdens here lie with the poor, the working classes, minorities and marginalised groups, and women, but there is hope too: we have the chance to create a new age of sustainability, and exit the Anthropocene; this requires collaborative, commons-based approaches, however.

But how may this happen? Where will we find the leadership to support it? How will we manage the conflicts that will inevitably arise? Part of the problem here is also to manage the relationships between humans and non-humans; here, humanities and social sciences that study the relations between humans must also extend to questioning the boundaries of the human and its relations with the non-human world.

Scholars must thus revise how we understand media and communication in the digital media; we must read the media and understand their material effects and environmental impacts, also in social terms. The media industries have a critical role to play here too: they form a part of the commons in the Anthropocene and provide crucial arenas for promoting much needed social change. But they are also linked to pollution, energy and water use, the promotion of consumption, and other problems – yet their activities can also benefit the commons.

Annika now points to the EU’s European Green Deal, which calls for some 100 climate-neutral, net-zero cities in Europe by 2030; this has to date produced plenty of local government commitments, but now also requires action – and journalism and other forms of communication are critical to creating real change: this initiative cannot simply be about place-branding, but must also involve citizen dialogues and engagement. Such initiatives also provide key opportunities for the involvement of media and communication scholarship, of course – enabling us all to formulate new approaches to sustainably inhabit the planet.