A Communication Framework for Packaging Better Ideas

I’m on the road again, and in Berlin for the two-day ECREA PolCom 2023 conference. We begin with a keynote by Lance Bennett, building on his recent book Communicating the Future. His opening question is how the major political ideas that affect everyone’s lives navigate the noise of everyday communication: how do they become dominant, and can we build a conceptual model to explain this? Are those ideas that become dominant actually good ideas, and if not, how can this be changed through better communication? Underlying this is also the question of power, of course.

Current dominant ideas in the world are continuous economic growth and neoliberal globalisation, for instance; these made it difficult to control economies, also because of the minimisation of government regulation, and this has had severely damaging impacts on our planet. What better ideas are out there, and how can they gain a greater audience?

Lance begins with the idea of economic growth, which goes back to economist Adam Smith – but Smith himself did not privilege the idea; only the neoliberal focus on continuous GDP growth since World War II brought it to the foreground. It equated growth with prosperity, even though such growth can also stem from war and other forms of wealth destruction. Such growth is not sustainable – it simply outstrips the available resources.

Growth became a dominant idea even though there were perfectly good alternative ways of thinking already established – e.g. the idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’, which foregrounded the limited availability of resources on Earth, and the need to develop a closed, circular, sustainable economy. But this idea appears to have been unable to compete with the growth narrative – why is this, and what has held the idea of sustainable economics back?

In other words, can this case be grounded in a broader analytical framework? Lance proposes what he calls the Idea Flow Framework: when dominant ideas are challenged by obvious problems and failures (as Keynesian economics was in the mid-twentieth century), this opens up space for new ideas. As Keynesianism collapsed, neoliberal economics stepped into the breach – but why it, and why not a more sensible and sustainable form of economics instead?

Lance suggests that the framing of such ideas is critical here, and poses a series of key questions: who produces what volume of ideas with what general themes? To what extent do different actors in the same field share those ideas and resources? How are such ideas packaged in symbolic formats? How well do those ideas and the actors promoting them connect with each other?

First there is idea production: the volume and clarity of ideas depend on organisational resources, validation methods (focus groups, polls, beta testing), and agreement between promoters. This results in idea packaging: emotionally engaging narratives and images; easily spreadable memes and frames; and adaptability to different audiences and media formats.

This then results in idea networking (or not): aligning different target audiences (political and business elites, voters, consumers), saturation of media platforms with those ideas, content that invites user participation, and public display via signs, slogans, icons, fashions, and events. And successful idea networking produces idea uptake by elites and publics, and especially by political, social, and other influencers.

These stages can be observed in the rise of neoliberal economics: despite the available packaging of the ideas of sustainable economics, a small circle of free market economists and libertarian thinkers very successfully organised themselves in the Mont Pelerine Society in 1947, and produced and packaged their ideas through a network of idea factories: a global network of libertarian, free market think-tanks (or “second hand dealers in ideas, as Friedrich Hayek called them). There are now some 500 such neoliberal think-tanks across 100 nations. These ideas were taken up first on the right (with Reaganism and Thatcherism), but later also on the left (by leaders like Clinton, Blair, and Schröder).

But does this mean that good and better ideas about a more sustainable economy were lost altogether? No – they are still around, and there is a smaller network of public-interest think-tanks still promoting them, as well as a network of global economic movements that support them. But this does not include an economic programme: the focus is on saving the environment, but not on saving it by changing the economy. Its approach to producing, packaging, and network ideas is noisy and fragmented, with little consensus on core economic ideas.

Instead, where there was institutional uptake of environmental ideas it was packaged with the concept of economic growth – for instance in the concept of ‘sustainable development’, which gained substantial traction since the late 1980s. Sustainable development is thus a successful idea, and a network of organisations evolved around it – even though there is little evidence that it works.

Meanwhile, engagement with the concept of sustainable economics has flatlined, in part also because efforts in this space are unable to attract any funding from individuals and organisations whose business model is predicated on the idea of continued growth. There is no competing economic story on the environmental side that can compete with the dominant story of ‘growth and jobs’, partly also because the network of environmental organisations remains fragmented and disunited. This makes them non-competitive.

This can only be addressed if the economic ideas competing with the neoliberal growth paradigm can be strengthened. It is one thing to point out all the crises associated with neoliberal growth – but what solutions can be recommended here? And how might the field of communication help to develop general frameworks for the explanation of complex problems and the promotion of these new solutions? Can we introduce public-interest norms into our work, to encourage the field to work towards social good?