Representing Global Public Concern: A Critical Analysis of the Danish Participatory Experiment on Climate Change

Abstract

Drawing on the recognition that questions of discourse and power are vital components in analysing the public participation in environmental governance, this paper examines the ways in which dominant scientific discourses about the Earth's climate inform the types of public talk facilitated in and by mini-publics, particularly when they are 'scaled up' to address environmental issues such as climate change. World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) serves as a case study. Conceived and organised by the Danish Board of Technology, WWViews was a historically unprecedented public forum in which participants, invited from a range of nations, were given the opportunity to deliberate on key themes addressed in the negotiations taking place during the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen (COP 15). The overarching purpose of this analysis is to invite reflection on the practices and assumptions that serve to make up publics in relation to issues that have been framed, predominantly, as scientific, universal and global.