Environmental Communication and Community: Constructive and Destructive Dynamics of Social Transformation

As society has become increasingly aware of environmental issues, the challenge of structuring public participation opportunities that strengthen democracy, while promoting more sustainable communities has become crucial for many natural resource agencies, industries, interest groups and publics. The processes of negotiating between the often disparate values held by these diverse groups, and formulating and implementing policies that enable people to fulfil goals associated with these values, can strengthen communities as well as tear them apart.

This book provides a critical examination of the role communication plays in social transition, through both construction and destruction of community. The authors examine the processes and practices put in play when people who may or may not have previously seen themselves as interconnected, communicate with each other, often in situations where they are competing for the same resources. Drawing upon a diverse selection of case-studies on the American, Asian and European continents, the chapters chart a range of approaches to environmental communication, including symbolic construction, modes of organising and agonistic politics of communication.

This volume will be of great interest to researchers, teachers, and practitioners of environmental communication, environmental conflict, community development and natural resource management.

Tarla Rai Peterson is a professor in the Department of Communication and Coordinator of RARE Mozambique at the University of Texas, El Paso, USA.

Hanna Ljunggren Bergeå is a researcher at the Division of Environmental Communication, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.

Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF), USA.

Kaisa Raitio is an associate professor at the Division of Environmental Communication, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.