Climate Actions Communication Machine

Abstract

Present thesis explores whether communication on climate in danish municipalities enables climate action. Today, there is a call for climate action in politics and society and a discourse is emerging on cities’ ability to create said action, herein achieving the Paris Agreement. In Denmark, the project DK2020 – Climate plans for Denmark aims to create local climate action based on the Paris Agreement’s objectives of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Middelfart Municipality is a pilotparticipant in DK2020 and in 2020 they implemented a climate action plan. Analysing this case, the thesis aims to answer the research question “What happens to Action, when communicating about municipal climate action?” The thesis is built on empirical research combining document analysis and qualitative interviews from the DK2020 project group and Middelfart Municipality. It is based on a post structural approach, enabling a focus on dynamic structurers and communication’s constitutive consequences. The thesis’ main parts consist of two analyses and a discussion. In the first analysis, we use Ernesto Laclau & Chantall Mouffe’s discourse theory to analyse how DK2020 ascribes meaning to climate action and municipal responsibility. We conclude that the discourse overfills the notion of climate action through problem/solution structures creating climate action as a multi-solution. The first analysis becomes input for the second analysis, as we observe that DK2020 positions itself as premises for the municipalities’ premises. In the second analysis, we observe how Middelfart Municipality attach to the premises offered by DK2020. The analysis draws on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. We conclude that the Climate Plan and climate communication seeks to change the administrative system’s observations to include climate action through processual and potentializing steering technologies. In the discussion we question whether the communication on climate action enables climate action. Here, we emphasised that the communication heightens the complexity in Middelfart Municipality in three ways. Through creating steering paradoxes, potentializing and polyphonic climate communication. These complexities create a climate communication machine which responds to complexity by creating more climate communication, thus enabling the communication to continue indefinitely. We argue that communication on climate action risk decoupling action from communication. Finally, we relate our findings to regenerative sustainability, presenting a potential for including a 2. order perspective.