Nathan Young

Seeing climate change: the visual construction of global warming in Canadian national print media:

Visual communication is a critical but frequently under-estimated contributor to the ‘social and cultural life’ of environmental issues. This paper uses both content and discourse analysis to examine how visual communication is deployed in print media coverage of climate change issues in Canada. The Canadian case is internationally significant, given that Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol but has since become obstructionist on the global stage. Our analysis, which focuses on image-language interactions, leads us to conclude that climate change is being inconsistently narrated to Canadians in this regard. While the power of visual communication comes from its ability to blend fact and emotion, to engage audiences, and to add narrative complexity to linguistic claims (and vice versa), we find instead a profound disjuncture between images and text in climate change coverage. In this case, visual and linguistic communication tend to pull in different narrative directions, advancing unrelated and sometimes contradictory claims that frequently confuse different aspects and positions on climate change.

Experts’ understanding of the public: knowledge control in a risk controversy

This paper reverses the common emphasis in the literature on public understanding of science by examining “experts’ understanding of the public.” This research uses the case of aquaculture in Canada, a highly contested mode of production that has divided the scientific community and public opinion. Using a survey of 300 aquaculture experts in Canada, we examine three dimensions of experts’ understanding of public “contributions” to this controversy. These are (1) stakeholder participation in aquaculture regulation and policy, (2) the media as an interpreter and communicator of expert claims, and (3) the knowledge and values basis of general public opinion. We find that experts’ views on lay knowledge and participation in the debate swing from strongly positive to strongly negative. Using quantitative and qualitative data from the survey, we argue that these swings in experts’ views of the public coincide with issues of control over knowledge. Experts on all sides of the aquaculture controversy are markedly open to incorporating lay knowledge into scientific practices (a situation where expert control over knowledge is retained), but are highly critical of lay “consumption” of expert claims (a situation where expert control over knowledge is lost).

Government, Anti-Reflexivity, and the Construction of Public Ignorance about Climate Change: Australia and Canada Compared

This article compares the political strategies used by conservative governments in Australia (John Howard) and Canada (Stephen Harper) to manage public impressions of climate change and climate change policy. These cases are significant in part because both governments acted against the weight of domestic public opinion. While many studies of political resistance to climate change mitigation focus on the role of denial, skepticism, and counter-claims, our comparison finds a significant role for what we call “affirmation techniques,” namely the rhetorical acceptance of the consensus position on climate change followed by concerted attempts to control precisely what acceptance means. We draw on recent theoretical work on anti-reflexivity and the sociology of ignorance to explain the political effectiveness of these strategies.

Mobilizing New Science into Management Practice: The Challenge of Biotelemetry for Fisheries Management, a Case Study of Canada's Fraser River

Natural resources that are “commons” or held in public trust are notoriously difficult to govern. In the absence of exclusive property rights, authorities face the twin challenges of setting limits on the amount that may be harvested (a sustainability challenge) and determining how the harvest should be distributed (an equity challenge). These decisions, which are often controversial on their own, are particularly difficult in fisheries management, where

Envisioning the Future of Aquatic Animal Tracking: Technology, Science, and Application

Electronic tags are significantly improving our understanding of aquatic animal behavior and are emerging as key sources of information for conservation and management practices. Future aquatic integrative biology and ecology studies will increasingly rely on data from electronic tagging. Continued advances in tracking hardware and software are needed to provide the knowledge required by managers and policymakers to address the challenges posed by the worlds changing aquatic ecosystems. We foresee multiplatform tracking systems for simultaneously monitoring the position, activity, and physiology of animals and the environment through which they are moving. Improved data collection will be accompanied by greater data accessibility and analytical tools for processing data, enabled by new infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure. To operationalize advances and facilitate integration into policy, there must be parallel developments in the accessibility of education and training, as well as solutions to key governance and legal issues.

Globalization from the edge: a framework for understanding how small and medium-sized firms in the periphery ‘go global’

The great majority of theoretical and empirical writing on economic globalization continues to focus on urban and semiurban regions, while largely ignoring the vast rural and peripheral spaces of the world. This paper uses research with small and medium-sized enterprises in remote regions of British Columbia, Canada, to develop a way of understanding the unique practices involved in ‘performing’ global economic action from the rural periphery. Specifically, a framework based on insights from three theoretical approaches is advanced—relational network theory, an actor-network approach to distance, and complexity theory in economics—that, in combination, allow the capture of what is unique about efforts to ‘go global’ from marginal geographies.

Working the fringes: the role of letters to the editor in advancing non-standard media narratives about climate change

This article examines the role of letters to the editor in advancing and sustaining non-standard narratives about climate change in the print media. The letters page is a unique section of the newspaper that is subject to distinct functional and normative pressures. It is also a place where standard media norms are weakest and non-journalistic narratives have an opportunity to leak in. Using research into climate change coverage in eight major Canadian dailies in 2007–2008, the article employs content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine how letters advance fringe arguments into the print media landscape that would not stand up to regular journalistic scrutiny. While these arguments come from all sides of the issue, it is argued that letters are particularly important for establishing and legitimizing conservative-skeptical perspectives on climate change.

A roadmap for knowledge exchange and mobilization research in conservation and natural resource management.

Scholars across all disciplines have long been interested in how knowledge moves within and beyond their community of peers. Rapid environmental changes and calls for sustainable management practices mean the best knowledge possible is needed to inform decisions, policies, and practices to protect biodiversity and sustainably manage vulnerable natural resources. Although the conservation literature on knowledge exchange (KE) and knowledge mobilization (KM) has grown in recent years, much of it is based on context-specific case studies. This presents a challenge for learning cumulative lessons from KE and KM research and thus effectively using knowledge in conservation and natural resources management. Although continued research on the gap between knowledge and action is valuable, overarching conceptual frameworks are now needed to enable summaries and comparisons across diverse KE-KM research. We propose a knowledge-action framework that provides a conceptual roadmap for future research and practice in KE/KM with the aim of synthesizing lessons learned from contextual case studies and guiding the development and testing of hypotheses in this domain. Our knowledge-action framework has 3 elements that occur at multiple levels and scales: knowledge production (e.g., academia and government), knowledge mediation (e.g., knowledge networks, actors, relational dimension, and contextual dimension), and knowledge-based action (e.g., instrumental, symbolic, and conceptual). The framework integrates concepts from the sociology of science in particular, and serves as a guide to further comprehensive understanding of knowledge exchange and mobilization in conservation and sustainable natural resource management.

How do potential knowledge users evaluate new claims about a contested resource? Problems of power and politics in knowledge exchange and mobilization.

This article examines how potential users of scientific and local/traditional/experiential knowledge evaluate new claims to knowing, using 67 interviews with government employees and non-governmental stakeholders involved in co-managing salmon fisheries in Canadas Fraser River. Research has consistently shown that there are major obstacles to moving new knowledge into policy, management, and public domains. New concepts such as Knowledge Exchange (KE) and Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) are being used to investigate these obstacles, but the processes by which potential users evaluate (sometimes competing) knowledge claims remain poorly understood. We use concepts from the sociology of science and find that potential users evaluate new knowledge claims based on three broad criteria: (1) the perceived merits of the claim, (2) perceptions of the character and motivation of the claimant, and (3) considerations of the social and political context of the claim. However, government employees and stakeholders have different interpretations of these criteria, leading to different knowledge preferences and normative expectations of scientists and other claimants. We draw both theoretical and practical lessons from these findings. With respect to theory, we argue that the sociology of science provides valuable insights into the political dimensions of knowledge and should be explicitly incorporated into KE/KMb research. With respect to practice, our findings underline the need for scientists and other claimants to make conscious decisions about whose expectations they hope to meet in their communications and engagement activities.

Using Nudges to Reduce Waste? The Case of Toronto's Plastic Bag Levy

The overuse of disposable plastic bags is a major environmental problem across the globe. In recent years, numerous jurisdictions have sought to curb disposable bag use by implementing a levy or fee at the point of purchase. These levies are typically small and symbolic (around