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Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I'm Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today's conversation is with Dr. Caron Chess, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and the former director of Rutgers' Center for Environmental Communication. Her current research interests include understanding how organizational factors affect public participation and the communication of risk.
Joe: Thanks for joining us, Caron. You're a university researcher these days; tell us how you wound up doing this.
Caron: Well, right now I'm a professor, and it really feels different than what I did before. It's much easier. [Chuckles.] Before I used to be part ... I used to be part of government and I worked with, uh, a range of citizen groups when I was in government. Before that I was an environmental advocate. So, I've been on both sides of that fence, and being an academic I get to study it and, uh, that's a lot easier than, uh, being a practitioner.
. . . And what I found out when I was within government was that there are a lot of very well intentioned, very smart, very committed people who from the outside look very stupid, uh, and very uncaring. And I was looking at, why is that so? What's going on here? And I realized some of it was, uh, poor communication from inside to outside -- a lack of sensitivity within government to what things would look like outside to their client audiences. And not that it was uncaring, but it came across as uncaring. And so I became very interested in what's now become termed risk communication, or public participation, those kinds of things. And started doing some work on that and got asked by Rutgers University to come do research here.
Joe: It's probably useful to define public participation. Is it the same thing as public outreach? Is it the same thing as public engagement? Or communication? How do you define "public participation"?
Caron: Well, there's lots of different ways to define it. Let me first say that it's not the same as public outreach. I think of outreach ... uh ... uh, in terms of one way communication; it's more of a monologue. And when we talk about public participation, it's at minimum a dialogue. Uh, and it ... it's usually an interaction that's more than, uh, communication. Uh, it usually goes a little bit deeper than that. So, it's been defined various ways and I would think of it as a . . . an organized process to involve public concerns and values in government and agency decision making.
Joe: You know, it's probably just because the terminology seems somewhat abstract -- "public participation," "decision-making" -- that it may cause a person to wonder if the examination is somewhat abstract, too. Is studying "public participation" just "academic"? Why do you care about this?
Caron: I think some of it is from
being on both sides of the fence and experiencing the frustration of being
in government, and trying to do really good things and finding out that we
weren't appreciated by people outside. And that, therefore, we weren't
able to implement things as well as we might have liked. And having
been an environmental activist and having really good ideas, uh, good science
and fact, and too often being seen as obstructionist as opposed to part of
the solution, to be trite. And so, having been on both sides and felt frustrated
on both sides, I think I feel, uh, a need to, uh ... think about bringing
those parties together.
Also,
when you think about environmental problems, I think the solutions ... uh,
the solutions are gonna have to involve all different kinds of people working
together. The problems are just too difficult to be solved by any one
kind of person.
Joe: Would climate change be such a problem?
Caron: Uh, climate change is definitely such a problem. Climate change just raises so many issues, from individual behavior to policy elements. It has very complex science behind it. It has long term effects, but we need to have some fairly short term behavior changes. I think it's ... You name just about any communication problem and climate change has it.
Joe: Right, so it's probably safe to say that decision making about climate change is going to involve a good deal of public participation. So when professionals who work in, say, a government agency, and lead public participation activities. . . Do they usually rely on experience and instincts . . . rather than on the research about public participation?
Caron: None of us really knows what public participation professionals rely on. But my sense is that the research literature has been coming out fast and furious in the past five and ten years, so it really hasn't trickled down necessarily to the practitioner audience. Uh, the very experienced practitioners, uh, particularly those in agencies like EPA where there's been some attempt to add institutional learning, I think some of them are familiar with the literature.
And one of the interesting things to look at is the extent to which practitioner rules of thumb parallel the research literature. That is, what we're finding out in ... in the research about public participation, does it correlate with kind of what a good practitioner would do. And I think some of it's beginning to hold up. I don't think we know enough to say, well, the ten top rules that practitioners live by are also quoted by research. But I think we can say that, uh, broader participation tends to be better participation. That, more involvement, uh, can often be more effective than less involvement. That if there's a controversy, being proactive with public engagement's gonna be more effective than waiting till people are throwing bricks at you.
Joe: You've written about a communication gap between what agencies say and what they do in terms of involving the public.
Caron: When you look at ... uh, when you look at government agencies and the way they're organized, it's not surprising. Government agencies, for instance, environmental protection agencies, they're job is not defined as public engagement. Their job is defined as implementing regulations That's what their mandate is. That's what legislatures expect them to do and fund them to do.
So, agencies necessarily do, um, what they've been mandated to do. And, public participation is something that is mandated under a number of laws, but the extent to which that publication ... pub ... participation needs to occur, uh, how effective it is, none of that's defined. So you can skate along the surface and nobody's gonna say, wait, wait! You didn't have public participation.
Joe: You're listening to Communicating Climate Change. I'm Joe Cone at Oregon State University, and we're talking today with Caron Chess of Rutgers University. Our broad topic is public participation in decision-making. With a changing climate that's going to become only more important, so we're looking for insights from social science research that can improve both the process by which the public is involved and the practice of those who are trying to involve them.
In 1996, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed approaches to successfully involving the public in decision-making, and they identified two key elements of success, using the memorable phrase: getting the right participation, and getting the participation right. What did they mean, Caron?
Caron: In terms of, uh, right participation, the view in the National Academy report, we're talking about the appropriate range of participation. That is, who are the interested and affected parties. Do you really get people who want to be at the table, who are invested in being at the table, or do you say, god, those people are just so difficult. And let's ... let's just not have them at the table. . . . The research seems to be suggesting that in a number of cases, excluding those difficult people can lead to even more difficulties down the road.
. . . perhaps one of the most important things for a group public participation process is somebody to have expertise in public participation. You don't have somebody doing hydrological studies if they're a social scientist. And we shouldn't have people, um, advising on public participation if they've never done that before. So, some of my best friends are public information officers, but that doesn't mean that they have experience running public participation efforts. So if you have no expertise in what you're doing, it would not be surprising if it ends up not going well. And one of my concerns is that agencies will try public participation, fall on their face, say we always knew that it was impossible. Well, in some respects they set themselves up.
Joe: We've been focusing on the process of communicating with the public. Is that all there is?
Caron: Uh, communication is not
just, you know, the kumbaya approach. Uh, as a matter of fact, if you ... the
research from ... uh, the research on, quote, "publics" and
what ... what makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside is not just that the
process is fair or that they've been involved. But they ... they
look at outcomes. They look at decisions, and do the decisions reflect,
uh, their interest and concerns.
.
. .I was observing a public participation process of an agency that I'll leave
nameless for now, uh, where the person convening the process, which had to
do with, uh, water regs, had the best intentions and was really excellent at
dealing with the stakeholders involved. And the stakeholders involved,
to a certain extent, defined the process. They wanted part of the process to
be, uh, a monthly full day meeting to discuss some of these very thorny and
complex issues. So this had been going on for about eight months.
Well, guess what happened? A new boss came in, came to one of the meetings of the advisory committee and said, guess what? We don't need your advice anymore. And I saw industry representatives sounding like environmental activists -- What ... what do you mean, you're not gonna listen to what we have to say anymore? We haven't covered, you know, these topics. And we want to know what you're gonna do with the input that we've given you already. And it was absolutely amazing. So, suggesting that it doesn't matter the kind of person that you are, that if people spend a lot of time on something and then they're dissed, so to speak, they're gonna be upset. And it doesn't matter whether they're industry people or government people, local officials or environmental advocates. So, you can make anybody furious at you if you're an agency.
Joe: Ooo, that's really unfortunate. But you'd hope that organizations and agencies had mechanisms in place so that they could learn from experience, if nothing else, and avoid such missteps. I'm thinking about the parallel cases of university Extension agents as well as government agency public affairs people. Is it common for these public institutions to have mechanisms in place to develop organizational learning?
Caron: Too often there's not. I mean, I think one of the best way for people to learn is from each other's experience. And, because agencies and Extension, for that matter, don't think about participation that much, because they don't see it as central to what they do, they don't see it as central to what they need to learn about. So, when Extension agency ... agents get together, they will often talk, I think, about manure management practices or water quality studies, or whatever. They're not sitting down and talking about, um, how did you engage those farmers in dialogue? I think it's almost assumed that Extension agents just were born doing that. Uh, whereas they have to keep up with the literature on water quality and manure management.
Yet, if you talk to Extension agents, or people in agencies, what they'll often say is, gee, the science isn't that difficult. The flow of people are difficult. And so, that says to me, well, why aren't we spending more time looking at the people side? Why isn't there more research on the people side? Why don't we have more Extension agents who focus on the people side and work with other Extension agents to give them support? Now, you know, let's also realize that when you look at the history of Extension, uh, some Extension agents have been masters at working with farmers. And whether they know it or not, they've been involved in participatory processes. Good Extension agents know that there is no way you can just go to a farmer and say, use this fertilizer, or don't use that fertilizer. . . So good Extension agents know exactly what participation often needs to look like with farmers. And they know that it's not just at the end, at the decision making stage. That you need to engage farmers early on in to ... in ... you know, what is the problem that we're facing here and what are the constraints that we, as farmers, feel?
Joe: The public often seems to see government agencies as faceless bureaucracies where the bureaucrats are all the same in terms of their attitudes about the public and involving them. Are they "all the same"?
Caron: Well, we looked at one agency and we looked at people who were doing public participation in various forms in the agency; and that doesn't mean that they were people who were only doing public participation. It meant very often that these were people who were practitioners who dealt with the public on ... in some form or another. Essentially what we found -- and this is in one agency -- two kinds of practitioners. One that we dubbed Eeyores; those people who tended to say, gee, there's no support for me doing communication. It's difficult for me to learn about communication. I don't have the resources for communication. My managers don't support my doing public participation and there's no easy way for me to continue this. And it was kind of a ... a ... not only woe is me, but woe is the agency.
And then there were the people we called Tiggers, who, uh, by contrast, uh, were equally committed to public participation, but tended to feel like their managers were more supportive. That they might not have enough resources, but somehow they could do a lot of what they wanted despite that. That they were learning from experience, that there were opportunities to learn. Uh, they were not flip sides of each other, but if you're familiar with Winnie The Pooh, you you know that Eeyore and Tigger were not opposite sides, but it's kind of an approach to the world.
. . . So, that raises questions about, you know, why is this? that there's not a real quick fix. That is, give people training in public participation and we've got this problem knocked. That in fact there needs to be dialogue within the agency between Eeyores and the Tiggers to learn from each other's experience and to see what they see as barriers and ways that they might be able ... able to overcome them.
Don't people dealing with solid waste learn from accumulated experience and talk with each other about the problems they've encountered and how they've gotten over them? Don't they share, um, a list of key people, consultants or, um ... uh, manufacturers or advocates that they think need to be involved in something? Um, I think they do. But when it comes to public participation, they tend not to think of it as ... in as much depth, or as specifically. I think because it's not as valued as much.
Joe: I'm thinking now of the professionals I work with in a university setting, the faculty of the Extension Service. . . How would being more familiar with the findings of social science, of the kind of work you do, help them be more effective in their work?
Caron: I know that Extension agents get frustrated. I mean, after all, they became Extension agents because they wanted things to change. Otherwise, they'd just sit behind their computer all day and just be academics. So, Extensions ... Extension agents are people that I tend to really like, because they're out there trying to do things. They have incredible barriers, but they also have ... tend to have a lot of enthusiasm and a real understanding of the people that they work with.
And at the same time, they feel really frustrated because they can be knocking their head against the wall and trying really hard and writing brochures and making videos, and things aren't changing very much. Or, even worse, they think things are changing because there's an anecdote of one or two farmers doing something differently, but does that mean it's more than one or two farmers, or do you only hear from the guys ... or the gals that really like you and, you know, are more apt to say that. And the people who are silent who knows what they are saying?
So, given that I like Extension agents, I want them to be able to change the world more effectively. And, if they're using the same old model; that is, if I give people information it's gonna change what they do, then Extension agency ... .agents are gonna be less successful and more frustrated. I think uh, guidance targeted for practitioners, particularly Extension agents even, uh, on their topic, I think is the best way to go.
What concerns me, however, is when people write these guidance documents and they really don't have the experience or the understanding of the literature. And they're tossing out ideas and people try them and they run into a lot of problems. And that also has to do with consultants who come around who say, for a certain amount of money, I'm gonna change your life. Now any ... anybody who says, don't worry about it, after I've trained you, public participation, stakeholder engagement, whatever you want to call it, is gonna be easy, that's ... save your money. That's the person you don't want to talk to.
If there's someone who says, yeah, I'll work with you on it. There's no immediate answer and ... I think it's really important for you to do it and I'm gonna help you to do it better, but there's no cookbook, there's no formula. A lot of this has to do with the particular context and the issue and the personalities involved, that's the person you want to have on your side.
Joe: This has been a conversation with Caron Chess of Rutgers University, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That's "s-e-a-grant": one word, "dot," "oregonstate" as one word, "dot, edu." Thank you for listening.
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* Joe's audio re-recorded from off-mic original questions.