Spinning climate change: Corporate and NGO public relations strategies in Canada and the United States (original) (raw)
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Sustainable communication: green PR and the export of corporate environmentalism, 1989–1997
Environmental Sociology, 2019
This article evaluates the role of public relations (PR) consultants as influential actors in the politics of environmental governance. It examines the historical case of EnviroComm, a network of environmental PR firms that sought to define and manage the communication of environmental issues during the consolidation of the European Single Market in the early 1990s. The article presents EnviroComm as an epistemic community, drawing on in-depth interviews and archival research to show how its members engaged in information sharing, capacity building, and rule setting around environmental management. The network developed and successfully promoted environmental standards, practices and disclosure processes among public and private sector clients throughout Europe, the United States, and Mexico during a critical time period in international environmental governance. By diffusing its core principles of sustainable communication as best practices, EnviroComm helped not only to diffuse an American variant of corporate environmentalism as an alternative to public policy but also to cement environmental communication as a field in its own right. More than an intermediary, it acted as a cultural producer in the realm of environmental governance.
PR, community building and the challenge of climate change
2007
Abstract: How is public relations to fulfill the community-building role some claim for it when the community faces a major disruptive threat? This paper explores that question in the context of local impacts of global climate change. It proposes adopting a community development strategy to help build local capacity to handle major risks.
It is now recognized that industry representatives influence the news reporting of climate change. Still, debate continues over the form and the extent of their influence particularly in the absence of detailed analysis of their presence across time. This paper places industry in the frame by analyzing their perspectives within a period of rapid politicization of the issue in the UK (2000–2010). Mapped across elite reporting, industry presence appears to be fluid, not static, and to respond to the politicization of the issue and to the journalistic logic that shapes elite coverage. Perhaps as expected, industry is pro-active in providing a perspective on climate change as an economic problem and projecting its " green credentials " in prime positions across the reporting. Mostly, however, this reporting uses its reactions to comment on other industry or elite activities, practices and policy. The findings show that interactions between the media and the political context underpin the observed outcomes of the pro-active and the re-active public relations by industry, in addition to shaping the presence of other speakers that contribute to the complex issue of climate change.
Public relations and climate change impacts: Developing a collaborative response
2007
Abstract Global climate change effects pose problems both for community development professionals concerned with strengthening communities and for public relations practitioners confronting communication challenges. This paper suggests that each discipline has something to offer the other in dealing with communities facing climate change impacts.
Talking Green in the Public Sphere: Press Releases, Corporate Voices and the Environment
Nordicom Review, 2014
In a climate of growing public concern and monitoring of business' impact on the environment, corporations and industry groups have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their environmental reputation and to influence the outcome of environmental debates in the public sphere. In this project, we provide an exploratory description of how the largest Swedish corporations selectively subsidise environmental news-making by supplying it with promotional materials disguised as journalistic copy. We analyse a year's worth of public relations output from the largest 15 companies traded in the Stockholm exchange or owned by the Swedish state, in order to shed light on the environmental themes they cover, the techniques they adopt to maximise the likelihood of media coverage and the evidence they provide to support their claims. Our analysis shows that corporate voices make substantial use of environmental and ecological arguments in their strategic communication, but they provide little useful information about the company's impact and do not usually foster forms of dialogic stakeholder engagement.
Corporate discourse on climate change
2011
Politicians in the many nations have not been responsive to community concerns about global warming because of a highly successful corporate campaign of misinformation and persuasion. Corporations that would be affected by measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions set out to confuse and deceive the public and policy-makers on the issue. They used corporate front groups, public relations firms and conservative think tanks to cast doubt on predictions of global warming and its impacts, to imply that governments do not know enough to act, and to argue that the cost of reducing greenhouse gases is prohibitively expensive and to promote doubtful solutions such as 'clean' coal. Since the 1970s corporations have increasingly set the political and the public agenda of democratic nations through their use of business organizations, public relations, lobbying, and funding of third parties such as media, think tanks and advocacy groups. This is particularly true of environmental issues and global warming provides a good illustration of how these promotional activities have determined public policy. Public respect for business was at an all time low during the 1970s and 'for the first time since the Great Depression, the legitimacy of big business was being called into question by large sectors of the public' (Parenti, 1986, 67). Public interest groups were challenging the authority of business and seeking government controls over business activities. The first-wave of modern environmentalists were blaming development and the growth of industrial activities for environmental degradation. Their warnings were capturing the popular attention, resonating as they did with the experiences of communities facing obvious pollution in their neighbourhoods. Worst of all, from a business point of view, governments were responding with new environmental legislation (Beder, 1996, xii). For business, the new regulations and the increasingly vocal public interest groups meant that new ways had to be found to get what they needed from government, shout down the opposition, and harness the power of interest groups for their own benefit (Blyskal & Blyskal, 1985, 153). Individual companies and trade associations established 'public affairs' departments. Chief Executive Officers also devoted increasing amounts of their time to government relations. A survey of four hundred public affairs units in large and medium-sized firms in 1981 found that most received more than half a million dollars each year in funding and more than half were set up after 1970 (Saloma, 1984, 67; Vogel, 1989, 195-7). Corporations also put large amounts of money into advertising and sponsorships aimed at improving the corporate image and putting forward corporate views. Much of this advertising was on environmental issues. One 1974 survey of 114 large companies 'found that 30 to 35 percent of corporate advertising addressed environmentalism, energy-related issues, or the capitalist system.' Over $100 million dollars was being spent each year on this sort of advocacy advertising during the mid-1970s particularly by oil companies, electrical utility companies and the chemical industry (Vogel, 1989, 217). Businesses began to cooperate in a way that was unprecedented, building coalitions and alliances and putting aside competitive rivalries (Beder, 2006b). Neoliberal theories that had long been espoused by fringe economists and think tanks were embraced by big business because they provided a legitimation for their pursuit of self-interest and avenues for business expansion. The policy prescriptions that suited business best-including reductions in taxes, minimal regulations,
The relevance and the objectivity of an analysis, no matter the field the object of the research heads for is given by its profoundness and the extent to which factors or elements that determined its evolution are identified. This study focuses on the specific manifestation of public relations in the field of sustainable development, environmental protection and ecology. We will demonstrate the diversity of the application areas of public relations, as well as the necessity of applying public relations in the field of environmental protection, sustainable development and ecology. This system exists and can occur both at a central and a local level, but there is needed a reconsideration, an introduction to the forefront of a new vision of public relations and their application. The environmental agents are called to resize or to center things more precisely so that they regain their full value, so that the role of public relations can gain new values. In the context of a more and more obvious focus of many specialists from various fields on the problem of public relations, in a sort of appreciated and hope-giving frenzy, this study can support even modestly the effort of re- systematization of some points of view or clarify some aspects that are more difficult to get in touch with, sometimes because of objective reasons. Key words: public relations, ecology, sustainable development, environmental protection
Climate Change and Post-Political Communication
Climate Change and Post-Political Communication, 2018
For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners’ goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a ‘post-political’ issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.
Communication Practices and Political Engagement with Climate Change: A Research Agenda
In this article, we call for a refocusing of research on citizens' political engagement with climate change. In doing so, we argue that communication practices not only help create the conditions for political engagement but they also comprise the modes of such engagement. Our argument proceeds in four steps. First, we review the literature on public engagement with climate change, concluding that there is a lack of attention to issues regarding the political. Consequently, we make the case for a refocusing of research on political engagement. Second, we explain how the notion of political subjectivity helps us to understand the relation between communication practices and engagement with the politics of climate change. Third, we discuss examples of dominant communication practices that constrain citizen political engagement by depoliticizing climate change, and alternative communication practices that have the potential to politicize. We end by outlining the many research questions that relate to the study of political engagement with climate change.
Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship
Routledge eBooks, 2020
In Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship, Munshi and Kurian once again deliver a powerful work of the highest quality scholarship that insists on our attention. Shifting the terrain for both functional and critical approaches to public relations, they emphasise the fundamental importance of action, connection and relationship to resistance communication. As a way of understanding the many acts of resistance to planetary domination by capitalist and political elites, the power of public relations for sustainable citizenship is both emergent, built on organic connections that grow as causes and concerns multiply, and urgent, built on a passion for justice that should engage us all. As such, this book is not only a powerful alternative theorisation of public relations in the interests of the planet and its people; it is also a call to action for scholars and practitioners to democratise public relations and use its power productively."-Lee Edwards, London School of Economics and Political Science This book examines how public relations might re-imagine itself as an instrument of "sustainable citizenship" by exploring alternative models of representing and building relationships with and among marginalized publics that disrupt the standard discourses of public relations. It argues that public relations needs to situate itself in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it, and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it. Interlacing critical public relations with a theoretical fabric woven with strands of postcolonial histories, Indigenous studies, feminist studies, and political theory, the book brings out the often-unseen processes of relationship building that nurture solidarity among historically marginalized publics. The book is illustrated with global cases of public relations as sustainable citizenship in action across three core elements of the earth: air, water, and land. In each of the cases, readers can see how resistance movements, not necessarily aligned with any specific organization or interest group, are seeking to change the status quo of a world increasingly defined by exploitation, overconsumption, sectarianism, and faux nationalism. This challenging book will be of interest to students and scholars of not only public relations but also the broader social and management sciences who are committed to issues of environmental and social justice.