Remaking public engagement with climate change

As Earth becomes more heated, public engagements with climate change multiply. Despite this increasing multiplicity, assumptions of public deficits still prevail. Dominant perspectives assume a deficit of public understanding where publics are dismissed or communicated to, or a deficit of public involvement where publics are invited to participate in discrete, often one-off, engagements. Given deficiencies of these perspectives, this article suggests a third more constructivist perspective is emerging and necessary which sees public engagements with climate change as constructed through practice, highly diverse, and interrelating in wider systems and ecologies of participation. It opens up new paths for remaking participation, one of which is illustrated through work on ecologising and mapping diverse public engagements with climate change. This is turning around participation to be more reflexive, systemic, responsible and responsive about other diverse, already existing and excluded public engagements in prompting more just and humane ways of addressing climate change.