Engaging the public with climate change: behaviour change and communication

摘要

This book is a valuable compendium of the social science that has been deployed to get the climate change message across. The individually authored chapters are succinct and well written (those who study communication know how to communicate!). The scope is breathtaking. It ranges from governments to local action groups, from architecture to brain cells (literally) and from Marks and Spencer's Plan A to individual consumer choices. It was based around the presentations made to a conference in 2008, so the contributions are largely free standing and this book is a little eclectic. Given that many of the conceptual models presented do not comfortably overlap, the discussion must have been rich and it is a pity, for once, that there is no summary of probing questions that often make up the value of a conference. Models that have their basis in utility theory have no mechanism for collective choice. Models of local group action have little room for the socially autistic.