I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.
Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in its own right. In recent years this especially addresses the question of the energy transition to renewable fuels and lower-energy practices.
This covers several fields: infrastructure and energy use, including for instance the environmental impacts of digital media infrastructure, online streaming services, and data centres; stakeholders, engaging a diverse range of individuals and organisations in promoting the energy transition; acceptance, promoting clear and persuasive messaging; media content and discourse analysis, e.g. through climate change coverage and discussions about the impacts of crises like the Russian war on Ukraine on energy supplies; and energy justice, highlighting power imbalances across the production, distribution, and use of energy, and calling for more decentralised energy ownership structures.
The ongoing energy transition cannot be stopped, but how it unfolds depends crucially on energy communication, then. Beyond the crisis narrative, energy communication should be established as distinct and growing subfield within our discipline.
